We've had the federation sandbox running for over six months but we're now able to commit to open federation on the production network this month as well. There's also stackable moderation coming shortly, which enables other individuals/orgs to operate moderation labeling services that users can choose to use.
The technical challenges of setting up an (efficiently) scalable decentralized social network were quite interesting. The infrastructure itself is quite decentralized, with standalone PDS instances and two small shared-nothing datacenter PoPs. We're using SQLite with millions of individual databases for each user's repository and ScyllaDB for the global indexing service (AppView).
https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect...
If anyone has questions, technical or otherwise, some of the team should be around today to answer them.
Edit: HN'ers might also appreciate this paper written primarily by Martin Kleppman about Bluesky and AT Protocol
If Threads, BlueSky, and ActivityPub all interconnected it really would be a great opportunity to compete on the software / UX front
Why should we trust Dorsey again?
What is one good reason to use Bluesky over Mastodon?
https://atproto.com/guides/faq
2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.
Very excited for this - IMO, this is federated social media's biggest promise.
Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public.
Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here.
...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.
Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist.
Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...
I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.
https://joinmastodon.org/servers
At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.
On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.
Will people be able to opt out of your moderation services?
Most social media moderation in my experience tends to be heavy handed. Most jokes could be offensive to someone and likely are. I'd prefer to preserve the collective works if George Carlin and Richard Pryor over heavily filtered systems.
Edit: appears to be completely opt in and based on tagging... Wonder about positive filtering by tag now...
Question. The phone will be attached to my account or is for one-time verification? If the latter, it is removed from blue sky database at some point?
Thanks.
Anyone can run a Relay. They're somewhat comparable to Linux distribution FTP/HTTP mirrors.
Bluesky will always run a Relay, but other organizations will hopefully as well. We expect these might be organizations doing other things in the ecosystem, universities, and possibly open consortiums.
Aha, this is good to now. Looking forward to standing up my own PDS.
Twitter is an obvious influence on Bluesky.
Was the team able to benefit from the experience of working on Twitter, or were most of the big problems novel?
And like most things with atproto, there will likely be protocol support for pluggable search engines, so users can choose their search provider(s).
It's already entirely possible for others to operate atproto search engines since all the data is public and available.
A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.
When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter
Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.
And to be clear, not all of bluesky's culture is a response to twitter, a lot of it is just the kind of lighthearted playfulness you can only get on a small and new social network.
How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem
Maybe the biggest problem with Twitter never was its centralization.
It shouldn't be surprising that cloning Twitter mechanics just to decentralize it would result in the same signal-to-noise ratio as Twitter.
It's disappointing, because a lot of work has gone into these. Especially Mastodon and Pleroma.
It seems to expect a number without the country prefix, starting with a number like "174" or whatever your provider prefix is...
Anyway, hoping you revisit this one day and that's also when I will try your app again. Wishing you luck!
I definitely would never give my phone number to a social network.
I don't see how any Twitter clone would avoid the pitfalls that make social media like Twitter fundamentally annoying. It's not about the technology or being federated or not, but about such internet-scale communities just not working well. You'll always end up with online drama about the silliest things and terminally online power users.
Everybody hates Discord, but I think more communities should strive towards isolating themselves from the broader net to keep conversations civil.
1. A direct port of the ragescrolling, today's-main-character culture of twitter 2. Complaining about mastodon and linux on a premise I haven't been able to tease out but appears to relate to open projects being inherently untrustworthy and private projects that receive funding being trustworthy. 3. Hyping Bluesky's ease of use (it is identical to Mastodon in every meaningful respect, except where Mastodon offers some additional functionality like private posts).
I got out. I love a lot of the people that moved there, but the rage culture alone was what I originally left twitter to avoid. It's kind of a cultural AOL in the post-twitter-social space, with all that entails.
I think you have to dig into that, and figure out why internet-scale communities don't work well, and then whether or not bluesky addresses it.
First of all, what does internet-scale really mean? I think it has to be that, to some degree, everyone is talking at everyone else.
For twitter and some other social networks this is because users don't fully control their feed -- they see what an algorithm decides they should see... and the algorithm is designed to increase engagement... because ads are how the social network makes its money. So you have content creators competing to make the most engaging posts and twitter doing its best to deliver those posts.
So I think it's probably twitter's ad driven business model, combined with the sad fact that it's a lot easier to engage people with anger and outrage than with civil, thoughtful content, that leads to a social media wasteland more than whether you need an invite to join.
I don't know if it will work, but if bluesky stays away from an ad-driven business model, they can let people control their own feeds and creators aren't incentivized only for engagement and it might stay a nice place to visit and hang out.
But if the niche is artificially created by fact that community is gated, then such community is not sustainable. Cabin fever and general fatigue of users.
I follow a bunch of musicians. I love going to concerts, and it’s the easiest way to find out when they announce tours. The unfortunate reality is that scalpers make buying tickets a terrible experience, so unfortunately I have a strong interest in knowing exactly when tickets go on sale to improve my own chances of getting tickets.
The problem is that the rules will be made by humans and will be enforced by humans. This will never be even close to perfect, especially with bad actors which are inevitable when a platform gets popular enough.
The old school forum model does the best job of threading that needle that I have seen so far. Forums are easy enough to stumble across when searching a relevant topic, while the narrow focus makes them less of a magnet for stupid trolls and attention seekers.
Reddit solved the hosting and setup problems of a forum, but that company is so far into the enshittification spiral that it hardly seems like a worthwhile place to invest much focus.
I wish that all of the neo-Twitter resources where going towards making better forum-like platforms that actually encourage thoughtful discussion while also leaving space for more lighthearted posting.
It's not instant, like social media, but lends to longer communication.
More like a self hosted, distributed Facebook group, less life Twitter.
Feedback: the homepage looks more like a tech product pitch site, and the announcement post also doesn't look very polished. I guess the target for Bluesky isn't so much the "regular Facebook/Twitter/IG user", more the nerd.
Side question: what's the interop story between Bluesky and Mastodon now?
I think it's more "regular Twitter user". It has implementation details that interest nerds, but my read is that the target audience really is regular users.
If you mean Threads, it's currently up to 130M monthly active users[0]. Estimates for Twitter late 2023-early 2024 are between 350-400M MAU.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/threads-now-reaches-more-1...
I do not know how usable it was but at least I was able to see the posts. Now I'm not. Well except for some lucky occasion when it shows the post just without replies.
https://ubuntu.social/@launchpadstatus
to this:
Please note that this is not me advocating for this practice. It has broken the web in immensely frustrating ways.
I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks the very strong account portability feature that made AT Protocol necessary.
AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky network is completely open. The Bluesky network has had an open API for a year with full access to all public data (no auth required):
websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos
Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account from Mastodon.
And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out this year.
Bluesky wasted a few opportunities they could have grabbed market share from Twitter simply because a) you needed and account to view posts (now fixed) b) you needed a code to sign up (now fixed).
But has their ship sailed? L
With the fragmentation of social networks and different audiences being in different places, it's a bit annoying to have to manually post in different places (taking account of things like hashtag formats and post length limits), it'd be nice to have a site/app that helped with that.
https://fedica.com/ seems to maybe be a parent company (acquisition?) of Hootsuite.
https://buffer.com/publish I first heard about this ages ago as a way to build a queue of things to put out to Twitter. They likely support Mastodon and LinkedIn now, but probably not yet the others. See https://support.buffer.com/article/567-supported-channels
Or is it like Tildes whose goal is to have a mobile website that is just as good as a native app?
But I appreciate the pointer!
to add some more substance to my comment this is how I see Bluesky's virality/stickiness playing out: everyone's going to move to it, it's going to be an unofficial but incompatible "fediverse2", folks will pretend the actual Fediverse doesn't exist, and then the actual Bluesky public benefit corporation (or some derivative, come on guys you wanna get filthy rich) will eventually turn to a data brokerage/ advertising play to enshittify the entire thing.
My point was subtle, that this shouldn't be an issue. It has been solved in various ways.
Not sure what they mean with "Dock it every port, your network comes with your" Is it federated?
"Come with me to the wonderful land of BlueSky, where everything is *open* and *magic* and all bad trolls are blocked!"
"That's amazing! I think I'll like it here!"
"YAY!"
On Twitter I just curate who I follow so I don't see annoying stuff and that's worked perfectly fine for me.
I can't speak for BlueSky, but I've been enjoying Mastodon a lot. Following people I like has given me a high enough signal to noise ratio that I often find myself saying "Hey! Check out this thing I found on Mastodon!". My friend just joined because of this, and they've been enjoying it too, specifically for programming, infosec, and queer memes (caveat N=2).
Idk. I hope there's a future for it.
That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows."
In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.
I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too.
Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.
Uggh. And the fragmentation into silos continues.
If you're on an instance in a federated network and the instance's admin decides that they don't want to keep hosting it, you don't really have an option to stay.
A lot of people felt burned by the changes at Twitter over the past 14 months or so. They made meaningful connections on there and with new ownership came changes that altered the character of the platform, in their eyes. But because Twitter is centralized, it's difficult to move your social graph to a new platform in a robust way.
The promise of the AT protocol is being "billionaire-proof." If Bluesky gets bought out and you don't like the new owner, you can move your entire social graph and all your posts to a new atproto service without needing permission from the old service.
That would be the nuclear option. A smaller step you could take before that is use a different set of moderation services to curate the experience you want (more info: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation)
Bluesky is too much of a woke echochamber and it doesn't even have a real chance at achieving its mission, which was decentralized, permissionless, uncensorable sharing of information.
Unfortunately, this project is dead on arrival. I don't think it will ever reach mainstream adoption.
Unlike reddit, filtering down the feed just doesn’t pay dividends in the way niche subreddits can. I guess it’s because the personalities and views which have been interested in leaving twitter to join bsky all fit the same template.
For instance, the AI, business, tech, and finance communities are simply not there. Performance art, too. Media/politics is there, but the discourse is extremely flat.
IMO, the "Discover" feed can be a bit much sometimes. It's very much the collective id of a certain type of social media poster. And not always my cup of tea.
But the beauty of Bluesky is there are millions of accounts and thousands of custom feeds you can pick from to tailor your experience.
For example, here's one where people share photos of mushrooms: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hsqwcidfez66lwm3gxhfv5in/fe...
Bluesky accounts should be permitted to have both a bsky.social username and one with a custom domain. If I am a company and want to use @myname.com as my username, I would not want someone @myname.bsky.social to fall into the hands of anyone else. So it sort of necessitates signing up for 2 accounts, if only to reserve your name so nobody takes it.
It just feels super quiet to me at the moment, and I suspect the long time exclusivity played a big role in that.
There IS a way to use this to develop your online professional brand, but it is so hard not to get bogged down in the swamp full of below-average intelligence, bots, and now AI garbage.
The email field prompts to create a new password (and generates it there) and the password field there is no prompt.
Don't build your house on rented land. Especially if the rent is zero.
It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
I'm sure we won't know until someone tries. I have a feeling there might be some unforseen network effects or barriers that build up over time to prevent someone from coming along with a better site. I'm just curious to see what they are and how insurmountable they might be.
Unfortunately the interest in Bluesky is not the same as it was, but still a viable Twitter alternative when compared to the others.
But my goodness this certainly did not age well at all. [0]
First impression? After selecting only tech subjects, my recommendations consisted of CNN journalists and newspapers. I decided to skip them and was forwarded to the Discovery feed which consists of American politics, Elon Musk hate, King Charles hate, and furries. So many furries.
I don't see the attraction. It's just a different hate bubble.
Sorry, I'm getting old and grumpy, but I'm not using any of the other social media sites, and I'm not planning on adding one to the list.