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Bluesky 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 tha
by AgentME 8mo ago
Bluesky 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.
- mh- 8mo agoAh, I see. Your use of the term "export" made me misunderstand. Though now that I've thought about it for a few minutes, I'm not sure what verb makes sense [to me] there. I guess "migrate?" edit: also, thanks for clarifying!
- verdverm 8mo agoyes, "pds migration" is a phrase you see more often
- fc417fc802 8mo agoI recognize that Bluesky is at present more open than Twitter and that all of the necessary building blocks for the infra are publicly available. That's good of course. However I think the view you expressed there is misguided. If Bluesky locked out third party infra tomorrow presumably the vast majority of people would not move. Thus vendor lockin via network effects remains. (Ie you are always free to leave but you'd be moving from a metropolis to a backwater.) The only scenario where this isn't true is one where no more than a few percent of the people you interact with reside on any given node. By that metric small AP nodes pass while large ones such as the flagship Mastodon node fail. Similarly Gmail and Outlook fail while any self hosted mail server passes. It's not an easy problem to solve.
- verdverm 8mo agoThere would be a revolt if Bluesky did that and doubt they will be so self-destructive. I'd rather be optimistic than nihilistic about it. It's still early and there are a lot of good things happening.
- esseph 8mo agoThat's a very strong statement to make.
- newsoftheday 8mo agoI generally liked Twitter before but not as much as now, since now it's not so heavily trolled by far left activists.
- zem 8mo agowhether you agree or not, asking "what's the issue" misses the point very badly, since the article is almost entirely about what the issue is (i.e. that most people will not change defaults and the default is to centralise on the bluesky servers)
- AgentME 8mo agoThe fact that the system is built around this escape hatch makes it miles better than almost all other social networks. An escape hatch doesn't need to be used by most people to be valuable.
- kevinak 8mo agoNostr doesn’t have these issues
- pfraze 8mo agoI know when I’m using a Nostr app because its logo is an endless spinner. At the scales these systems run at, you need large indexes. Distributing those indexes across many nodes would require a breakthrough in federated queries, and if you have one of those lying around I’d pay good money for it.
- verdverm 8mo agoNostr has different issues, people are where their preference for dealing with them is
- well_ackshually 8mo agoIndeed, and as a consequence Nostr has a dogshit user experience and approximately noone on it. Boy I sure love reading nothing and talking to nobody except nerds that jerk themselves off about how decentralized their platform is.
- AlienRobot 8mo agoIt's weird to focus on that when there isn't a single thing in software that doesn't suffer from "everyone will just use the default anyway"