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Be wary of Bluesky
- vibeprofessor 8mo ago[flagged]
- k4rli 8mo agoDid you really create an account here less than a month ago just to spend time hyping up how great Twitter and AI "claws" are?
- vibeprofessor 8mo agothey are awesome tbh, and i have 3 accounts here dating back from 2008 with something like 10k karma
- davidw 8mo agoGood points, but what's the alternative at this point? Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists. Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.
- PaulHoule 8mo agohttps://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever.
- seandoe 8mo agoThat's just not practical for most people (the publishing part). And in relation to microblogging, are you going to publish every 140-character, out-of-context thought on your personal website?
- 8organicbits 8mo agoThere's other syndication models, although POSSE gets talked about most. If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media sites. https://indieweb.org/PESETAS https://indieweb.org/PESETAS
- seandoe 8mo agoAnd the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky or whatever and the content is replicated to your pds. I recognize the minor difference, but if you have the energy and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across silos, surely you can setup a pds elsewhere.
- 8organicbits 8mo agoI think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the network effect as you have followers on other platforms already. People can still find you and your content isn't lost. Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.
- seandoe 8mo agoOk yea that makes sense.
- verdverm 8mo ago
- kevinak 8mo agoNostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.
- davidw 8mo agoBut does it have a critical mass of people? The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users." That's not my crowd.
- irusensei 8mo agoI hear you but if you think about it who else has an incentive and skills to create something like Nostr? Who are the people interested in free speech, signatures and decentralization and with the skills to pull it up? And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing everything. From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show. Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator. It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.
- verdverm 8mo ago> Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator. But you are right back to the same UX issue that prevented crypto mass adoption, i.e. lose your keys, lose everything Very few want to own that risk.
- prmoustache 8mo ago> Very few want to own that risk. But they are all willing to own the risk of getting their hotmail/google/apple/meta account being disabled on a whim without explanation.
- manuelabeledo 8mo agoIsn't Mastodon an alternative?
- davidw 8mo agoNot in terms of having a critical mass of users for many topics or being very accessible for a lot of people.
- loeg 8mo agoIf you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a dead end.
- davidw 8mo agoI mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it is not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things I'm interested in to make it worthwhile.
- prmoustache 8mo agoBut mastodon too in my case so I guess it is just a totally subjective YMMV thing.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- manuelabeledo 8mo agoI can’t comment on the “critical mass”, since I haven’t got the numbers. But what exactly does “accessibility” mean in this context? What are the challenges of opening an account in mastodon.social?
- verdverm 8mo agoThe first challenge most people have when starting AP / Mastodon is that they are presented with a choice "pick a server" before anything else. That's what I hear most often anyway. The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that they have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an index or business. People need to eat and they turned off a lot of developers who'd love to make their living building social media tech outside of the corporate oligarchy. ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional drama or hostility.
- moomoo11 8mo agoGo outside
- dangond 8mo agoI might be misunderstanding something about atproto, but isn't it always possible to export data from bluesky because all it takes is reading your data, which is done by any app interacting with your pds anyway? If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality entirely, no?
- 8organicbits 8mo ago> If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality entirely, no? Keep in mind, twitter got rid of their API. Google got rid of XMPP federation. Bluesky breaking or defederating atproto wouldn't impact most users, so they'd probably get less outcry than those examples. https://support.google.com/code/answer/55703?hl=en https://support.google.com/code/answer/55703?hl=en
- verdverm 8mo agoYes, there are backup services that can help so you cannot be locked away from your data too.
- runako 8mo agoWhen reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky" in the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the author's understanding of the space has major gaps. (Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
- kevinak 8mo agoI know very well what it is, it doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme of things. I wish it did!
- runako 8mo agoRe-reading my reply, it is worded more harshly than I intended. My apologies. I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may yet run into problems.
- api 8mo agoDoes it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will never use it. A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tpdly 8mo agoI think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses. People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden. The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mcint 8mo agoIt's good FUD. You re-iterate their talking points. (Also, no CTA, no takeaway, just "worry!") As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful. We do have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to use interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC commitment, which will at least have moderate legal costs if not a guarantee. It has unequivocally set a new high bar. They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The day may come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but the turn has to be pretty complete, because the data is pretty open. What's needed to view it, use it at all, is pretty close to what's needed to host it. "The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with other apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps." Yeah, it's possible. It's also possible they just close.
- AgentME 8mo agoBluesky is architected so you can export your data and follows and followers to your own or someone else's infrastructure at any time. There are some groups that have taken that offer and moved off of Bluesky's infrastructure (see Blacksky). The fact that most people aren't doing that is a sign that people are happy with how Bluesky-the-company is running things. What's the issue?
- kevinak 8mo agoMost people were happy with Twitter as well
- AgentME 8mo agoAnd Bluesky is better because you're not locked in and can export your posts, follows, and followers off of their infrastructure if they start being evil or you randomly feel like it. Companies like Twitter effectively wield network effects to stop people from leaving. All of one's activity on Twitter increases the sunk cost to keep them on Twitter in a way that's not true for Bluesky.
- mh- 8mo agoI don't have a horse in this race, but: > [..] machine-readable archive of information associated with your account in HTML and JSON files. [..] including your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your Moments, your media ([..]), a list of your followers, a list of accounts that you are following, your address book, Lists that you’ve created, are a member of or follow, [..], and more. (Note that I actually elided some additional things that are included in the export, for readability's sake.) https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-your-x-data https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-your-x...
- AgentME 8mo agoYou can't actually use your followers and following list from X on other sites. With Bluesky, you can move your profile onto other infrastructure, continue to see posts from people you follow, and make new posts that your followers still see like nothing happened. It's like how if you own your own domain name, you can set your MX records to whatever email service you want and change it when you want without affecting anyone you're having email conversations with.
- Retr0id 8mo agoThere doesn't seem to be a timestamp associated with this article, but it is based on outdated information.
- kevinak 8mo agoHow so? I should add a time stamp to the blog.
- Retr0id 8mo ago(For people reading this in the future, the blog has been redesigned since my comment - I was commenting on this version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260220235943/https://kevinak.se/blog/be-wary-of-bluesky https://web.archive.org/web/20260220235943/https://kevinak.s... )
- why_only_15 8mo ago[flagged]
- kevinak 8mo agoIt is not, but I have used Claude to edit it.
- tptacek 8mo agoClaude is an excellent proofreader, but don't let a single word it generates hit your final copy. Use it to catch things and point things out, and for nothing more.
- kevinak 8mo agoI’ll keep that in mind, thanks!
- 650REDHAIR 8mo agoWhy?
- _9za9 8mo agoThe guy you are responding to has "All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved." in his HN profile....
- cyberge99 8mo agoSounds like a hedge against Agentic bots.
- tptacek 8mo agoIt's good at spotting stuff, like: * Overusing verbs * Poor structure * Bad transitions between grafs * Passive voice And even bigger-picture stuff, like "you might want to zoom in here" or "this section isn't paying off". I've only in the past few months started using it for proofreading, and it's pretty solid. But if you take any of its words, you're infecting your writing with Claude's tone, and it will show. It's super useful as a reader of your writing. It's a terrible collaborator, unless you're writing for an audience of middle managers.
- shablulman 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- browningstreet 8mo agoBluesky isn't my bank records, isn't my photo archive, isn't my github, isn't my Documents folder. I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever. Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the coffee shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are 99K coffee shops in the US. I can go to another one. As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by despicable beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough interesting people that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee shop or a bar.
- davidw 8mo agoThis is where I'm at, but it would be nice if it had some more longevity to it, as there are costs to switching to the next thing and the thing after that.
- 627467 8mo agoI dont get why you're downvoted. Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is not yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should be disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be treated as disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material things your accumulate in life, why would you hoard random tweets, comments and reactions forever? If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way that doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity, no? "Switching costs" man... people move between countries with vastly different languages and cultures and they adapt, make new relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A to database B that difficult really?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dasil003 8mo agoThis feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out of social media entirely). I wish there wasn’t this tension between scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of tech were a little less winner-takes-all. But such is the nature of global digital distribution. Decentralization and local-first are nice ideas but they create a pretty high barrier to entry that keeps a lot of interesting people out. If I’m going to be on social media I don’t want to be in a cesspool like Twitter but I also don’t want to be an idealogical hobbyist bubble.
- qwertox 8mo ago> If an acquirer disables exports, it doesn't matter that the tools existed yesterday. Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the cheapest way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks to the EU (GDPR Article 20)?
- Spivak 8mo agoAlso, at best this says not to host your data on someone else's computer and keep control of it, which is a thing Bluesky explicitly supports and encourages. Will normal people do it, no. But you can.
- asadotzler 8mo agoThey can give it to you in the least useful way imaginable and will. What we want and expect is an export that can be easily imported to some other provider and that's where the "good guys" can differentiate. I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks, logins, etc. and import into any other browser with almost no trouble at all. Try to export your mainstream social network (facebook, twitter, insta, tiktok, etc.) content and connections and import it into another social network and let me know how that goes.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago"That's the same argument people made about Twitter. 'If it goes bad, we'll just leave.' We know how that played out." Yeah, I left. (And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
- eviks 8mo agoSo it played very poorly, you lost personal data and most importantly, social connections, and acquired a weariness
- yellowapple 8mo agoWhereas if Bluesky went evil tomorrow only the “acquired a weariness” part would happen, given that it's straightforward to move to a new PDS and take the entirety of your personal data and social connections with it.
- what 8mo agoAnd the app view? You can take your data, can take everyone else’s that you follow?
- yellowapple 8mo agoThe appviews are interchangeable; any appview will work with any PDS. Whatever appviews my followers and followees end up using, they'd still be able to see my posts, and I'd still be able to see theirs.
- verdverm 8mo agoI very much think that going evil is not a switch that happens over night. There are always signs or leading indicators there. If Bluesky starts showing those signs, we will start putting in effort to de-risk the network. The dev community is strong
- tacet 8mo agoI think it depends on person. The only social connection i lost is a person who lives on mastodon now. The rest of people that matter to me are on bluesky now.
- wmf 8mo agoThere are specific steps Bluesky could take to decentralize the network. These are going to sound extreme but I agree with the article that it will never decentralize on its own. (Nothing will ever decentralize on its own so this isn't a criticism of Bluesky specifically.) 1. Strongly encourage backups. 2. Force users to migrate off the "official" PDS until it has less than, say, 40% market share. 3. Make the mobile apps use third-party relay/appview by default (could be randomized).
- chickensong 8mo ago> Strongly encourage backups Or invert this, and make it local-first. It's your data, and publishing it to a network is a form of backup. Either that, or the client holds a local copy by default.
- wmf 8mo agoIt's not clear to me what a local-first social network would mean. The point is for other people to see your posts.
- chickensong 8mo agoThe data is local-first, but it's designed so that you publish to online networks. The point is to invert the current model of putting your content into someone else's network and hoping for the best, or expecting users to remember to run some manual backup that's probably going to be a pain to do anything with.
- theturtletalks 8mo ago>> You can self-host a PDS. Almost nobody does. Who would've thought true decentralization means everyone hosting their own server? Yes, each user would have to pay and maintain it, but that's the cost of decentralization. ATProto at least makes it easy to jump ship if shit hits the fan and not have to start from scratch. Try doing that with Twitter/Instagram/Etc.
- verdverm 8mo agoThat portability issue was a direct answer to ActivityPub I will give AP folks credit, they have looked at the success of ATProto and found parts they also think are good ideas and are bringing them back to AP. I'm not sure if the same can be said about Nostr, I keep my distance from that crowd. I wonder if this submission is reflective of the larger Nostr community or if it's one person who wants to write a put-down piece.
- publius_frog 8mo ago(Throwaway account.) Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own data, so that's enough, right?" Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into the did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web accounts by manually setting DNS records. So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting into this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers this, but maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from missing the point. Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which control users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to include more functionality that prevents users from easily exiting the network, e.g. private data is being implemented in a way where Bluesky LLC can see all your activity. The protocol changes often and with limited community input. This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and "our users are okay with it". The community does pretty consistently attack people who dissent (e.g. look at what happened when Mastodon leaders objected). There's a lot of cheerleading for people who do opt into the system, and there's really no incentive for informed criticisms. It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a great network for a number of specific subcultures who have a nice space away from X, and I hope the team embraces that.
- verdverm 8mo agoThe work to make the PLC not centralized has already begun 1. Non-profit (separate entity from Bluesky) 2. Moving to Switzerland (get the f' out of the US) 3. Consortium control (proof-of-authority) A PLC read-only mirror implementation was released the last week. I've been running one for a almost a year, redoing my hardware right now, so it's currently down. There are others out there.
- kevinak 8mo agoThis is still centralized.
- verdverm 8mo agoIt's still good enough for most people you don't have to like it, that's fine, you have Nostr as an alternative but when Nostr people come around bad mouthing everyone else, especially with outdated and misleading claims, you make people want to use Nostr less
- vvpan 8mo ago> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every layer, almost nobody does. But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. But also I don't understand why any of this is a reason to be "wary", it's a great place to be with some unique technical properties - it is way more "open" than any other platform of similar scale.
- bo1024 8mo ago> But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. The post discusses why, when all is not well, it will be too late.
- EA-3167 8mo agoAt this point I despair at anyone who doesn’t understand that the problem isn’t the specific architecture, it’s social media as a scaled up, algorithmically driven concept. Stick so many people on one social graph that can’t possibly be effectively moderated by humans and it will turn into the same pit every time.
- icehawk 8mo ago> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out. Yeah, it played out with my whole social circle leaving, as evidenced by the fact that all my friends link me to the bluesky post whenever there's something happening now.
- newsoftheday 8mo agoI know noone on BlueSky, I do have friends on X. We liked Twitter and we like X.
- beanjuiceII 8mo agosame here
- verdverm 8mo agoI salute the solidarity /s Joking aside, I think what we see in the larger scheme is a fracturing of social media. More choice, more competition. This is a good thing
- luqtas 8mo ago> More choice, more competition. This is a good thing. hopefully one day we lurk at the same protocol and type: with more federations, more choice. This is a good thing.
- verdverm 8mo agoATProto is designed to improve residence and resistance over time. The starting point and requirement was a UX that didn't suck. If you actually want to build a new social fabric that everyone will eventually adopt, you need to be easy and safe for normies, they care more about that than the federated stuff. Has anyone from the blockchain and federated world found a UX for key management that doesn't suck? Same problem, same non-solution afaik, for how many years now?
- 8mo ago
- jongjong 8mo agoIf anything gets too popular too quickly, I just assume it's a PsyOp. That kind of growth requires extensive media coordination and big money. If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product. As sure as gravity.
- verdverm 8mo agoGrowth was negative for about a year, it has started growing again this year. https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
- davidgerard 8mo agoBluesky growth spurts are always when Musk or (less frequently) Zuckerberg step on their dicks again and more people come over from their services. In between are slow declines.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- beders 8mo agoThis never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that you can use for free is nauseating. This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate. If you don't like that, go elsewhere. If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get. In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.
- kevinak 8mo agoI do advocate for using other networks (specifically Nostr) that are not designed like this, but the network effect is big and most of my friends are on Blue Sky because they have been lured into a false sense of “it’s decentralised, I can just move! If something bad happens”.
- verdverm 8mo agoWhat reasons do your friends give for choosing Bluesky over Nostr. I cannot imagine they would give the same reason you are projecting onto them.
- beders 8mo agoThe reason they are on Bluesky is that it just works, its client just works and the barrier of entry is low. Oh, and others they want to follow are on there. That's it. No regular user cares about - oh my data, it is stored centrally, how evil! That is just not a problem most people have. Like at all.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo agoBluesky's behavior here isn't surprising. They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block alias emails to their unban support address too.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoFor more atproto, see their recently redesigned homepage https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026 https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
- jeswin 8mo agoTrue p2p is the only approach that will work, not federation. I'd go futher and make the protocol high-friction for federation. It's true that many p2p attempts have failed, but it's also the only solution that doesn't require someone running servers for free. There's evidence of success as well: napster (and bittorrent). Both were wildly successful, and ultimately died because of legal issues. It might work when the data is yours to share.
- throwaway0665 8mo agoI can't imagine a world where a p2p social network is practical. Not when each node is an unreliable mobile phone that's maybe on cellular. Even with something like ipfs you have pinning services, bittorrent has seed boxes, because pure p2p is impractical.
- pessimizer 8mo agoI sort of agree, but federation is good. It's funny that you use bittorrent as an example because it involves every single user running servers for free. If people can both be an origin for content and a relay for content, and modulate the extent to which they want to do either of those things, there's not really much of a difference between "federation" and "true" p2p. Some people will be all relay, and some people will be all content. Some content people might be paying relays, and some relays might be paying content people. Some relays will be private and some relays will be public. Some people will maintain all of their own content locally, and some people will leave it all on a specialized remote server as a service and not even care about holding a local copy. Also, browsing would either have to be done through a commercial or public service (federation again), or through specialized software (no one will ever use this and operating systems will intentionally lock it out if they see it as a competitor.) The problem with wishing this all into existence, though, is that bittorent (not dead) exists and is completely stagnant. There is often a lot of talk about improving the protocol, and the various software dealing with it, and none of it gets done. If bittorrent would just allow torrents to be updated (content added or removed), you could almost piggyback social media on it immediately. It's not getting done. Nobody is doing it, just writing specs that everybody ignores for decades. So I guess my belief is that "true p2p" is a meaningless term and target when it comes to creating recognizable social media. "True p2p" would be within a private circle of friends, on specialized software. Might as well be a fancy e.g. XMPP group chat; it's already available for anyone who wants it. Almost nobody wants it. Telegram, Whatsapp, and imessage are already good enough for that. They may not be totally private, but they're private enough for 99.9999% of people's purposes, and people are very suspicious of the 0.0001% who want something stronger. I actually think you're using "true p2p" here to sort of handwave a business model into existence (trying to imply mutuality, or barter, or something.) Whereas I think the business model is the part that needs to be engineered carefully and the tech is easy.
- themafia 8mo agoI've never looked at the AT Protocol before. It seems like you could have achieved most of that with existing DNS, HTTP and RSS implementations. All they really needed was some file formats and some well known URL schems and all of this could have been far easier to implement and deploy.
- verdverm 8mo agoThis is a good article [1] to get an overview of the "backend" of the protocol, it's very plug-n-play. One question I have about the setup you describe, how does moderation work? ATProto has the best moderation scheme I know of, "stacked." [2] [1] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers [2] https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
- davidgerard 8mo agoIt's very much a Not Invented Here of Mastodon and the Fediverse. Bluesky is a good user experience insofar as it's centralised. Mastodon is a bad user experience insofar as you're forced to be aware of the decentralisation. If you want successful decentralisation, Mastodon has that out of the box. You can stand up a Mastodon, Akkoma, GotoSocial etc on a $5/mo VM and you're an equal participant immediately. Or you can join someone else's server. ActivityPub is underspecified and Mastodon just ignored a lot of it and so the actual protocol is an unholy mishmash of the two. It mostly works though, by the process of people beating on it until it works. With Bluesky, you have a centralised service and a lot of people saying "decentralised!" AT Proto is theoretically decentralised in the fabulous future and points of absolute and financial centralisation keep turning up. I spend all day posting to both, fwiw. They each do a particular job. But the "decentralisation" in Bluesky is fake. Or at best, simply not feasiblly true.
- pentagrama 8mo agoSite is down at this moment. Archived: https://archive.ph/PsTrp https://archive.ph/PsTrp
- kevinak 8mo agoThere seems to be an issue with the caching mechanism that I built. In the meantime the article is also on Nostr if anyone wants to read it: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552az249g0qs8uz3t2dcqup2z94pyvgepj7qqfxyefdwashy7fddanz6cnvw4jhx6me7wwjc9 https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552a... Thanks for the heads up!
- Rakshith 8mo ago[dead]
- pfraze 8mo agoYeah I’m the guy quoted in the opening of the article. Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies. Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being factored into an independent org.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bjoli 8mo agoConsidering how hard it has been, and to some extent still is, to run your own Bluesky instance, the main problem is that it automatically becomes centralised in a way that no open protocol will solve. If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a distributed platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty sure most people would consider it a problem if mastodon.social started getting more than 40% of active users (currently at about 15 iirc).
- evbogue 8mo agoI'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check out Paul (and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from by using content addressable storage and signing key cryptography correctly. The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client that you can vibe/claw on top of: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc I'm happy to supply pub invites to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we work towards making social media distributed again.
- verdverm 8mo ago> Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto solves most of the issues in SSB For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the ATmosphere.
- DoctorOW 8mo ago> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out. But they migrated to Bluesky, right? So it played out fine?
- kevinak 8mo agoRight, but they couldn't take their social graph with them. They essentially had to start from scratch.
- thangalin 8mo ago> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful. Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a working, useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-agnostic, and re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take scads of effort. Now that LLMs abound, much of that grind is quickly solved. For example, here's a vibe-coded script that to get dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set up on my new server with mailboxes copied from an old server: https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt To vibe code it, the prompt included content from: https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutorial-with-dovecot-postfix-and-virtual-users-debian/ https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutor... After a few kicks at the can (run script, capture errors, feed errors to LLM, repeat), it finally configured a working system. Reviewing the script, yes, it's beyond painful. It doesn't have to be, though; the authors of complex software could produce similar guided installers.
- Arainach 8mo agoWriting code isn't the hard part of running an email server. Getting your server not marked as spam is essentially impossible, not a coding problem, and why everyone gives up on this.
- newsoftheday 8mo ago> Writing code isn't the hard part of running an email server. Getting your server not marked as spam is essentially impossible I've run my own since the 1990's, it is certainly possible, there are many others who have done the same. I have no issues with email deliverability. > everyone gives up on this. Not everyone gives up on it, some do, some don't.
- fluoridation 8mo agoHave you tried setting up a new one, though?
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- pmarreck 8mo ago[flagged]
- throwa356262 8mo ago"Find me online Nostr Twitter YouTube" Sounds like he was worried so much he left Bluesky already.
- verdverm 8mo agoI suspect they were never really interested in Bluesky other than to find ways they can blow out another's candle so theirs might burn brighter
- SilverElfin 8mo agoWith all the talk of LinkedIn’s problematic verification process and potential issues with Persona verification service being linked to Peter Thiel, I wonder why a social network like Bluesky couldn’t replace LinkedIn. What would it take?
- notpushkin 8mo agoGetting everybody to sign up and start using it like a LinkedIn. Network effects at play.
- yellowapple 8mo ago> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every layer, almost nobody does. And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing that “almost nobody does” problem. The fact that such a thing is even possible, and that it's seamless to move from one to the other, gives ATproto a massive leg-up compared to even other federated systems, let alone its non-federated predecessors.
- kevinak 8mo agoHow would they fix it?
- verdverm 8mo agoI explained in another comment you also replied to. It's not broken, it works as intended, the plan is for improvements and de-risking. Is there something missing from my answer about what the plan is for the PLC? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47104673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47104673
- yellowapple 8mo agoI don't think “they” have a whole lot to fix. It's more a matter of people needing to fix their own laziness. I'll be the first to admit I'm guilty of this, too, and still haven't gotten around to moving my main account to a self-hosted PDS (though I've at least taken the steps to backup my CAR and set my own rotation keys, such that if my PDS goes offline or hostile I can still migrate away from it).
- wmf 8mo agoIt's really the defaults that need to be fixed and anyone cannot change those.
- verdverm 8mo agoWhich defaults do you think need to change?
- heisenbit 8mo agoI suspect European courts would take a dim view on preventing export through switching off an existing mechanism yielding portability.
- dadrian 8mo agoFor someone to come in and buy Bluesky and then hold everyone’s data hostage, then Bluesky would actually have to have enough value that someone would want to buy it.
- kevinak 8mo agoVCs have put in $120 million, so someone thinks that it's worth something.
- thom 8mo agoLeft usenet, left IRC, left LiveJournal, skipped MySpace, left Facebook, left the blogosphere, will leave Twitter and BlueSky. You’re either in touching distance of grass or you’re not, none of this matters.
- elAhmo 8mo ago> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful and everyone just uses Gmail. The protocol being "open" didn't prevent centralization. This is an odd take and hard to agree with. I have never seen anyone complaining that email is a centralised service. GMail might be among the most popular solution, but there is a number of other solutions for "regular consumers", and many institutions, governments, etc. all run their email servers.
- highway900 8mo agoAll software has trade offs. The “for you” feed is ran on a home server, this is already imho a better situation than other systems. This could be cut off. But it could also be stood up again.
- verdverm 8mo agoIt could also be like The Seed from SAO, giving rise to 1000s more
- indolering 8mo agoIf you get rid of data portability, then isn't it basically a Mattermost server? What is the alternative without going full Nostr where you have to manage all the cryptography yourself? Either you handle the cryptography for the user AND allow them to DIY it or your target demographic is purely crypto anarchists willing to put up with a shitty UX.
- __MatrixMan__ 8mo agoThe question of whether the users are actually ready to defend is irrelevant if the attackers look at the defenses and decide that an attack isn't worth mounting. As we have learned, this is not a credible threat: > It will be hard, but we'll self host if we have to Bluesky offers: > It will be easy-ish, and we'll self host if we have to We shall see if it's credible enough to make corruption look elsewhere.
- verdverm 8mo agoIf anything in this thread has you interested in atproto, there is a conference in Vancouver, BC at the end of March https://atmosphereconf.org/?ref=verdverm.hn https://atmosphereconf.org/?ref=verdverm.hn
- ogundipeore 8mo agoI always wondered why people don’t adopt protocols like Nostr as much? At least with nostr you know you can use your private key on any other platform that supports it as a valid auth. The other problem of who owns the relay where the data is stored still exists. One way to solve this is a scheduled query of your data and keeping a local dump
- danrobi 8mo agoPaul Frazee’s. From Dat to AT Protocol: Paul Frazee’s decision to archive the Beaker Browser project in December 2022 and shift focus from the Dat protocol (now evolved as Hypercore) to the development of the AT Protocol indeed represents a significant pivot in his career. Many observers in the decentralized-web community, including yourself, continue to regard the pure peer-to-peer architecture of Dat and Beaker as an elegant and philosophically pure approach to user-controlled data and hosting. It is understandable to view this transition as a regrettable departure from what appeared, at the time, to be the most coherent solution. To provide context grounded in Frazee’s own documented reflections, he invested several years (2016–2022) in Beaker as a peer-to-peer browser built atop Dat/Hypercore. The system enabled one-click website creation, forking of sites, and early experiments with social applications such as Rotonde and Fritter. However, in his official post-mortem on the Beaker archive notice, Frazee outlined the practical limitations that led to discontinuation. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-notice.md https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-... He explicitly noted that the project “never solved the hard problems” required for broad adoption, particularly for dynamic social networking. In a more detailed 2024 essay titled “Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?,” Frazee elaborated on the specific shortcomings of pure peer-to-peer models when applied to large-scale social systems. He concluded that insisting on a fully device-hosted peer-to-peer network for a mainstream social platform “would’ve been a mistake,” given users’ unwillingness to sacrifice features or reliability for theoretical decentralization benefits. The AT Protocol, which Frazee helped architect as Bluesky’s CTO (a role he continues to hold as of early 2026), represents a deliberate hybrid synthesis rather than an abandonment of prior principles. It retains core peer-to-peer innovations—cryptographically signed user data repositories, hosting agility, Merkle-tree-based verification, and portable identities—while delegating aggregation, indexing, and high-scale delivery to dedicated infrastructure (Personal Data Servers, relays, and AppViews). This design enables the data sovereignty and forkability that Dat/Beaker championed, while delivering the performance, discoverability, and moderation capabilities necessary for widespread use. The ongoing FreeSky initiative, discussed in our prior exchange, further advances this by providing independent Personal Data Servers and relays, reducing reliance on Bluesky-operated infrastructure and realizing more of the original portability vision. The Dat/Hypercore protocol itself was not discontinued; it continues under the Holepunchto organization and powers other applications. Thus, the technical lineage persists in parallel. In technology development, particularly within decentralized systems, iterative refinement based on empirical constraints is common. Frazee has publicly framed the transition as an application of lessons from multiple prior projects (including Secure Scuttlebutt and CTZN) rather than a repudiation. Whether one regards the shift as a misstep or a pragmatic evolution depends on the relative weighting of ideological purity versus practical adoption and usability at scale. Bluesky’s growth to millions of users and the expanding AT Protocol ecosystem suggest the hybrid model has achieved broader traction than pure peer-to-peer social experiments previously attained. In summary, FreeSky embodies the practical "alternative" envisioned in early AT Protocol discussions—offering decentralized hosting and tools within the Bluesky-compatible network rather than a separate platform. For those interested in trying it, start by exploring custom handles through freesky.social or reviewing the dashboard for operational insights. Additional details are available via Project Liberty announcements and AT Protocol documentation at atproto.com
- fortran77 8mo agoBluesky has already turned evil. Even though nobody’s on it, I use Mastodon
- bigyabai 8mo agoI'm not on Bluesky, but "evil" is the kind of unqualified hyperbole that makes me curious what I'm missing out on.
- raincole 8mo ago> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out. I don't get it. What is this supposed to mean? Is the author implying people won't leave Twitter? If it's true then this whole article is pure waste of time: if people won't switch to BlueSky anyway then why should we be wary of it? BlueSky is a direct alternative to Twitter. The UI is a spitting image of Twitter's. The whole premise of BlueSky is that people will leave Twitter when it goes bad.
- p1anecrazy 8mo agoI believe s/he means that it as if the users are leaving X for BlueSky for decentralization, but actually they are facing a similar lock-in.
- verdverm 8mo ago> they are facing a similar lock-in. Which is where people take issue with the author, it's wrong, the PLC does not create lock-in, it is more akin to a single point of failure in ATProto, all apps are tied to this, not just Bluesky. I have other comments under this story that go into more details.
- __mharrison__ 8mo agoAs much as a dumpster fire as Twitter is, it is the best place for all things AI related. I'm on Bluesky, but find little benefit from it.
- lpcvoid 8mo agoSince AI is a grift, I guess that makes it a perfect topic for Twitter indeed.
- user205738 8mo agoIt's also the best place to subscribe to artists and generally find them. It's also strange that this is not mentioned, but in X it's easy to customize the feed for yourself and block what you don't like. I only see what I'm interested in, and I've never come across any content lately that I'm not happy with.
- rambambram 8mo agoI don't get it. What's wrong with a website and email address on your own domain, so you can be part of the decentralized world wide web?
- kaboomshebang 8mo agoReading some of the comments here. Perhaps the key to solid decentralization is solving the self-hosting problem. If self-hosting digital tools will always be a hassle to manage/update/maintain/upgrade/etc, then we will always rely on third parties. Almost every human owns a powerful device, but almost none have the know-how to run their own services. (That's why we rely on others, which has it's tradeoffs; honestly BlueSky seems a better tradeoff then Twitter, at least for now ;)
- casey2 8mo agoironically the structure of x/bluesky, that favors emotive content and echo chambers poisons its own data. You should be wary because the only kinds of people that can use these sites are those that get off on warping their personality to please the mob. I used to believe most people grew past this ape part of their brain some time between preschool and kindergarten, shortly after you stopped crying while hungry. On X and similarly on Bluesky all users lack emotional development. e.g. Kevin's last post begging people not to hate him. It's feels like walking front door and -50C and the ground is a red desert. You're from mars. This isn't on corporations or governments to regulate. This isn't on other people to move to your preferred clone. This is on YOU to use better software. And don't even get me started on the "value" these apps provide arguably it cheapens engagement and connections. Say you post that you're going to an event and a follower sees it 1) Since it's easier, the follower didn't need any interest it just popped up in their feed and they decided to go for validation 2) There are 2 phone drones at an event, repeat for everyone that does this now you are at a packed event with people that don't care, locking out the people that do.
- retropragma 8mo agoSomeone could make a backup script wrapped in a GUI, but then people would have to see the "need" in order to start using it. The bigger danger would be AT Protocol losing its biggest contributor. Unless another VC backed team appeared to fill their shoes, the protocol would stagnate and communities would slowly deteriorate. Hope is critical early on in a protocol's rise to prominence.
- verdverm 8mo agoThese services already exist as well as multiple copies of the entire network. My hope is that we find another path forward (!VC) for most apps on ATProto. Small social with lifestyle funding (sustainable indie) is what I dream of.
- luafox 8mo agoYes, Bluesky is extremely centralized right now. But it can be made far more decentralized quite easily - and I expect that it will become as such if the PBC turns evil. I personally run my own PDS for my friends and I, use my own AppView that fetches from my own Constellation, and rely on an alternative relay. I also don't like PBC's moderation, so I simply disabled it, and even if they block/ban posts or accounts on their part of the network, I still see them. But yes, I would like the DID directory to be decentralized. I still depend on it and can't easily move.
- AuthAuth 8mo agoPBC is a completely meaningless label. The only reason it exists is bluesky advertising. Bluesky is a corporation the same as any other.
- verdverm 8mo agoPBC changes one thing from a C corp, as I understand it, the investors cannot sue over financial stewardship and the related. It's not much, but it's also not insignificant and does mean they can prioritize something besides the investors
- cx42net 8mo agoSo your whole point is the *hypothetical* "what if Bluesky turns bad". And just with that hypothetical, you scratch the whole effort Bluesky is currently doing to offer an open protocol ? Which is the opposite of almost (Mastodon) all other social networks ? Come on.. It honestly feel like this was written by someone being paid by a competitor, just to discredit the service. Of course they will provide an infrastructure to ease users on to creating and using their service, they can't just provide an empty shell just for the pure purpose of decoupling the protocol and the service. You can't blame them for that (well, you can apparently..)
- verdverm 8mo agoAuthor is from Nostr and many of them love to hate on Bluesky and ATProto. They've gone as far as to maintain a sustained attack on the PLC, going on a year now. The continuously submit "valid" operations (technically, but not actually), which contain chunked images base64 encoded. Perhaps to bloat the database? Not really sure what the goal is here (assuming it's just a different bad apple from the Nostr crew)
- cx42net 8mo agoThank you for this clarification. I'm sad to learn I wasn't far from right on this.
- fnky 8mo agoThis is the crux of every decentralized system. If there's no one there to host the data and make it available, you have to start somewhere. The point of ATproto is that it gives you the option to move to your own, or someone elses. Bluesky is just a use-case which happens to provide a good enough platform that people don't need to host it. That's typically not the concern of most people anyway.