Jack Dorsey Unveils Bluesky Social, the Decentralized Twitter

https://www.geekmetaverse.com/jack-dorsey-unveils-bluesky-social-the-decentralized-twitter/

by redbell • 4 years ago

98 123 4 years ago

Imnimo• 4 years ago

https://atproto.com/guides/applications#record-types

So if I'm a social media platform that implements this protocol, am I restricted to supporting only the activities that Bluesky supports? Like if I wanted to have a network that distinguishes people I follow from people who I personally know, am I just out of luck because protocol doesn't support that distinction? And if I do create that distinction, what is its meaning when a user decides to migrate that data elsewhere?

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

I think there are two interesting sides to this here: First is that essentially a key part of this strategy is ideological, not pragmatic. Centralization came out of pragmatism, not ideology. It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up.

The second is that we seem to be seeing a lot of VC brain here. By that I mean, I can scream at a VC "OMG THERE'S A TRUCK COMING AT YOU AT 100MPH" and the VC will respond "Well what we need to do is look at how the concept of a truck is cha-" before becoming a fine pink mist. I'm not impressed by people who can't answer basic questions about their product. I know Jack will hate to actually address this, but: how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation? I get we can wax lyrical about freedom of speech, but how are you actually going to address thousands of people shouting the N word at your users? And if your answer is "It's decentralized, it's down to X,Y,X people" then I have to point out, you've just outsourced the most difficult differentiator of a social media startup.

nathanaldensr• 4 years ago

If the speech is illegal in whatever jurisdictions apply, then remove it; otherwise, it should stay. Yes, even trolling and slurs. If a platform emulating the public square goes beyond what is legal, it ceases to be a neutral platform and inevitably becomes a vehicle for propaganda. I realize that means propaganda could be spread by the users, but I'd rather than than the platform and users spreading it.

The real question here is defining "public square" legally.

labster• 4 years ago

Spam is 100% legal in all jurisdictions, so your legal free speech plan sounds like a total hellscape.

nullc3• 4 years ago

Bleh, I find your position is boring because it's so easily shown to be unworkable.

Imagine there have a platform run as you suggest and I don't like what you're saying on it: I flood you and anyone that supports you with not-quite-illegal abuse, misinformation, non-sense, spam, false flag support from people with deplorable views. Copy-cats of you that take your positions but weakly argued or with a touch of added genocide. At the end of the day almost no one will see what you wrote, and most of those that do will think you're probably a kook with deplorable views (since that's what you're surrounded with).

Censorship that works by outright blocking speech is a largely outmoded concept in a world where communications networks connect every one to everyone else. In such a world flooding with noise that undermines the conversations people want to have and undermines their willingness to attempt the conversations is a more effective tool to censor communications. Outright blocking isn't very effective, unless it's done secretly, because people will route around it and plugging leaks is extremely hard (requiring essentially AI complete filtering).

As such, censorship is now essentially its own opposite.

This means there really are no magical silver bullets. We ought to stop pretending that private spaces are public squares though-- though this is a problem offline too: with eminent domain being used to seize land and create giant privately owned open air shopping malls in many places... but at least offline doesn't have the same scaling properties that make it so easy to censor by inundating with noise.

JoeJonathan• 4 years ago

Elon?

stovenctl• 4 years ago

Laws aren't static. Also, when someone thinks they've been violated, it takes a lot of time and humans to settle it.

It's already hard enough to keep up with the laws in software.

2OEH8eoCRo04• 4 years ago

Centralization came out of pragmatism

Sort of? Centralization is more profitable and easier than building new open internet protocols and formats.

saghm• 4 years ago

Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.

consumer451• 4 years ago

Moxie's position on this is pretty strong, and on the side of platforms(centralization) vs standards/protocols(de-centralization), for product reasons.

blog: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

markstos• 4 years ago

how do you balance speech, censorship and moderation?

Decentralization does help a lot here. The X, Y and Z server owners don’t have to agree or coordinate. The fact that they will disagree on their policies is part of the answer. There won’t be a one-size-fits-all policy. Different servers will try different things and ideas will be shared about what works and what doesn’t.

Z server can choose to allow saying mean things and X and Y server can block and ignore posts from Z.

Some servers may have a political bias one way or the other and individuals can choose which to join and pay attention to.

cykros2• 4 years ago

Sounds like it'd just be another Mastodon -- and heck, likely get federated (or in most cases, not federated...the whole issue with Mastodon) in with the rest.

Back in the Usenet days we had killfiles to do user based filtering -- everything would get sent out, and users would decide what sort of content they didn't want to see. Obviously it was harder back then to just spin up a new identity, so it's not simply a matter of taking the old tech and slapping it on the new, but the approach avoided the splinter effect we get trying to decide for users what will and won't be available to them (whether they like it or not). Snowden actually tweeted a week or two about how trivial this would be to implement on Twitter if they ever actually wanted to (with a working one liner to prove it). The issue thus far has usually been that advertising funded social media THRIVES on the controversy, and only moderates what it needs to to keep advertisers happy. They don't WANT you to make it a pleasant experience, because controversy and fights get more ad views.

Perhaps at some point bandwidth becomes cheap enough that we can cut back on how much of a role advertisers play in steering the ship. Until then I don't see a great solution to any of this.

cma• 4 years ago

It seems hard for me to believe that deliberately choosing the less efficient solution is a good idea for a start up.

Many crypto scam startups have made bank with this less efficient strategy. Have you seen all the companies selling banks on internal proof of work blockchains and stuff?

dqpb• 4 years ago

As someone who is frequently rated limited on HN and occasionally scolded by HNs beloved religion-apologist moderator, I find decentralization to be not only pragmatic but truly essential for the next generation of social platforms.

chatterhead• 4 years ago

So he created a Mastodon clone?

intothemild• 4 years ago

Yes.. but with the power of blockchain™

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

Mastodoncoin

hprotagonist2• 4 years ago

now hire back the twitter moderation team, and you’ve effectively recapitulated the freenode/libera hard fork of 2021!

INTPenis3• 4 years ago

Oh lord I just made that parallel between the kid who took over freenode and Elon the other day. Both spoiled brats.

The two situations are actually very similar, even down to the crowd that took over freenode when everyone sane left for libera.

hprotagonist2• 4 years ago

tell me, have YOU ever seen andrew lee and elon musk together?!

stay tuned for the secret south african prince NFTs :)

mlindner2• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on why Elon is a "spoiled brat"? The term "spoiled brat" generally is implied toward people who were raised in a pampered lifestyle. Contrary to that Elon was bullied as a child in a motherless household with a task master of a father. Further, he had to work for his college payments rather than having his parents pay for it.

aquanext• 4 years ago

No thanks. I'm done with Jack and I'm done with Elon. Mastodon is great and it's already starting to feel like home.

Don't need anymore drama from these reckless people.

mlindner2• 4 years ago

Mastodon is only free of issues because the masses haven't found it yet. Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

SamWhited• 4 years ago

Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.

serf• 4 years ago

this is written as if you don't understand federated services.

How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it?

Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.

losteric• 4 years ago

Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

Why is lack of moderation a problem on Mastodon?

Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow, that creates a responsibility to moderate (plus they need to keep the advertisers happy).

The Mastodon timeline is direct follows. If I see some stuff I don't like, I can talk with that person or simply unfollow them.

mariusor• 4 years ago

Mastodon has plenty of moderation: every instance has it's own people, when questionable content makes its way from a non moderated instance to others, the moderators of the others can moderate it. If an instance receives moderation requests from the rest of the fediverse and doesn't act on it, it eventually gets defederated.

Having a process that distributes the load of moderation is better, IMNHO, than piling all that work on underpaid people.

trident50002• 4 years ago

Why does this feel so forced and astroturfed on this site and yet has essentially no traction

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

Musk's idea is to piss off 10% of the left and right of the spectrum and keep the middle 80% happy.

The left 10% will hang out on Mastodon or Fediverse, the right 10% will go on Gab or whatever. I think what's happenning is great for all. You do you™.

gjm11• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, it doesn't to me.

Discussing Mastodon is hardly "forced" when the overall topic is a new decentralized alternative to Twitter, since Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter that's been around for a while.

It seems unlikely that this is astroturf given that the person who posted it has been on HN for over a decade (though admittedly not super-active) and their comments are on a wide range of topics and not just Twitter or Mastodon.

freejazz5• 4 years ago

That could be a hint to reflect on your thought process

elforce0022• 4 years ago

Interesting. So you're creating your bubble just because you don't want anyone challenging your opinions.

Let's see how that goes a year from now.

freejazz5• 4 years ago

What about me, who never used Twitter and wont use this either? Did I make a bubble because I don't want people to challenge my opinions? How many tweets do I need to read a day until I have sufficiently challenged my opinions?

INTPenis3• 4 years ago

(EDIT: No it's not) This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering. First mentioned on HN many years ago.

I'm very into this stuff. I was into scuttlebutt long before bluesky was announced even.

But the problem I see is that with ActivityPub I already have a whole ecosystem of software and libraries, while with ssbc I have no idea where to even start. When ssbc was first announced I tried using it briefly but it was very basic, I hope they've come further.

With the fediverse I can literally jump straight into a container and have an instance running within minutes.

Is there an equivalent to activitypub.rocks for sscb?

https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ maybe this guide.

geoah• 4 years ago

This is the scuttlebutt protocol to anyone wondering.

Bluesky is not related to secure scuttlebutt, they are working on a new protocol currently called "AT Protocol". https://atproto.com

ATP is mainly federated so a bit closer to mastodon/matrix than SSB which is quite a bit more decentralized iirc. Do check out their docs, it's a work in progress but should give you a better insight to what they're doing.

INTPenis3• 4 years ago

I stand corrected. I thought I read at some point that bluesky was SSB.

davoneus• 4 years ago

I've looked hard at the Activity Pub protocol, as well as Mastodon in the last week, and this new protocol SUPPOSEDLY has a number of advantages.

1) you can move your identity from the gitgo. Yeah, sure, AP allegedly allows this, but your are at the mercy of the server owners to cooperate. Assuming, of course, the server even is still reachable. And even then, recent (last 5 months) there are numerous examples of transfers failing badly.

2) This protocol doesn't force you to trust that the server admins aren't reading your messages. This is not the case with AP.

3) The relay system, whereby to get notices from other communities, is wildly broken, and the two largest Mastodon servers don't even support them.

I'm as skeptical of Mr. Dorsey as anyone, and the community absolutely deserves the right to see deep into this protocol. That said, implying that Activity Pub meets or beats everything this new protocol offers is not correct.

prvc• 4 years ago

*unveiled (on Oct. 25)

cathdrlbizzare• 4 years ago

Decentralized means complicated and no regular people will use it.

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

Since it appears that regular people ruin every social network, I don't see this as a bad thing :-)

zajio1am• 4 years ago

Like no regular people use e-mail nor phones/SMS.

frizlab• 4 years ago

Indeed less and less people are using those. And when they do use email, they are using its centralized version, gmail.

Jaepa3• 4 years ago

I wouldn't disagree, but email is decentralized. My gmail account can speak to your yahoo account. Jack was a pretty big proponent of the Protocol, not Platforms mythos put forth by Mike Masnick.

dorkwood• 4 years ago

closer inspection reveals that the underlying technology will not be purely blockchain-based. “I’m confident in our decision not to put social media content on a blockchain,” tweeted Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. “It’s blockchain independent and optional."

What does it mean to be blockchain optional?

cyberge99• 4 years ago

Micropayments or similar will likely utilize a blockchain?

halfmatthalfcat• 4 years ago

Amazing Jack signed off on this, being so blockchain obsessed that he is.

pfraze7• 4 years ago

We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods. Some people ask us for that, eg did:ethr or did:ion. Unsure it’ll happen (I’m skeptical) but that’s what Jay was talking about.

dane-pgp2• 4 years ago

We use DIDs for identity but presently no blockchain DID methods.

I notice that the documentation[0] says:

"We introduced DID Placeholder because we weren't totally satisfied with any of the existing DID methods. ... We cheekily titled the method "Placeholder", because we don't want it to stick around. We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized. We expect a method to emerge that fits the bill within the next few years, likely a permissioned DID consortium.

which seems to be an admission that the hard part of distributed social networking isn't actually solved yet, and the project relies on "actively hoping" that a solution will eventually "emerge". I'm also not sure what a "permissioned DID consortium" even is, let alone how it would be useful here.

Anyway, it seems a bit premature to abandon ActivityPub and introduce yet another incompatible social networking silo, based on the hope that the new project's magic placeholder beans eventually grow into a sturdy beanstalk. Perhaps "Beanstalk Social" would therefore be a better name for Jack's project (and he could even keep the same acronym).

[0] https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

I feel like he should have taken a long holiday. Not being rude or anything, but a new social network needs thorough thinking. For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace. Maybe it is time that such a network is built - fun customisations and neutral content.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

"The thing you have to ask yourself ... is why the content was neutral ... do you feel lucky, punk?"

rad_gruchalski• 4 years ago

“What, are you a cop?”

pixl977• 4 years ago

For instance everywhere i read about the topic on casual forums, someone mentions myspace.

My grandparents also talk about how wonderful the past was, but that doesn't mean a lick of it was true. Was MySpace better? In some ways yes, but that's because we were better as social media users, and such massive bot farms, and financial interests in corrupting said social media didn't exist.

If you turn on MySpace today it would immediately become foul shithole. The first thing some spammer would do is start creating profiles based on every identity they could find and the site would have to deal with that. Massive amounts of time would be used in getting rid of scams and spam on the sites. User content would not be neutral because peoples internet identities are no longer neutral, we've weaponized and politicized them. In order to maintain the neutrality you'd spend untold amounts of time banning content and polarizing a large amount of the user base against you turning them adversarial.

Social media is a garbage fire these days. Most of the time I try to avoid talking about it on HN in order to stay in this sites guidelines.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

I dont think your analogy to rosy retrospection applies here.

The issues we have with todays social media are the same issues IRC, usenet and other primordial internet social tools have suffered from in the past at scale. People abandoned those for what they thought was better. They went on to myspace and eventually they gave up myspace and went on to facebook and twitter because they thought these would be even better. And they were for a while. Facebook was really cool when people limited to sharing meal and travel photos with friends and family. Twitter was cool when limited to sharing fun short stories or updates.

Then gradually the noisy plebe invaded. The drunken pub types debating angry politics, pseudo intellectuals, wannabe thought leaders, cheap scammers and sleazy politicians.

And instead of banning or pushing them towards network ghettos, algorithms where made to amplify specifically their voice, in order to bait all the decent people into engaging with platforms even more. These algorithms developed habits in us that turned everyone into a little bit of the above.

We tried this. Doesn't work. We need to iterate what worked. MySpace did. I fail to understand why facebook and twitter didnt put more thought into how to monetise the platform in better ways. Was it lack of imagination or the lack of people skills of their founders? Anger and politics are not the only things that drive sales and profits. Social networks are a reflection of our society and in a society you tend to marginalise the angry violent mobs that try to capture your attention and suck your energy, and instead you go where you can do your shopping, eating, reading, traveling, entertainment consuming safely and peacefully. Social networks can monetise on that.

Instead they made us fight each other.

pfraze7• 4 years ago

Something that isn’t clear to folks is that Jack is on the board and advises us, but Bluesky’s founder and team are pulled from the dweb community.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

Respectfully, the issue i see with bluesky and at is that it’s solving a problem no casual user really cares about solving. And jack hasnt been particularly great at solving the issue social media suffers from these days: toxicity. Facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit are all ridden by toxicity. Give us a place where nana and that weird cousin can socialise without risking being radicalised one political way or another, cant be misinformed and cant be scammed. On twitter i follow strictly science, book writer, game dev, and tech topics yet politics and identity issues are always creeping in. Angry mobs of glorified nobodies and their followers toxify.every.single topic. So instead of solving protocols please solve the quality of content and emotion. We need to fix the habits social media helped create instead of creating new ghettos.

Capture the beauty of life not the garbage of it. Look at human psychology and see what else other than anger can increase engagement and what algorithms can create a better culture. There is more than that emotion that can drive growth. I refuse to believe we are all angry shits, we can do better.

holografix• 4 years ago

Alternative title:

“Twitter ex CEO announces half-baked and social signalling fuelled, competitor product to entice as many as possible to leave Twitter and help line his pockets”

Whatarethese• 4 years ago

Keep the status quo and continue to line the pockets of a leveraged billionaire. Sounds good.

joecot• 4 years ago

help line his pockets

And his ego. The world already has both Mastodon, a decentralized twitter-like social media, and ActivityPub, a protocol for decentralized social media services to connect to each other. Dorsey has chosen to support neither, and instead make his own service and protocol that can't connect to it.

Bluesky has a wait list, while there's already a google doc full of Blue Checks that have moved to Mastodon[1]. I'm hoping grass roots open source succeeds over a billionaire with VC funding, but we shall see.

https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305242003516901

ratg13• 4 years ago

Curious why he would remain so invested in Twitter despite wanting to compete with them.

redwood• 4 years ago

Similar to or compatible with TBL's Inrupt?

tootie3• 4 years ago

This is not a new Twitter. This is a new phpBB or something. Absent centralization you don't get the "town square" factor. In marketing parlance, you don't get "reach". And you avoid controversial moderation tactics by making it not your problem. Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both. Even Zuckerberg is looking like a genius next to this guy.

pixl977• 4 years ago

Dorsey just cut bait and declared moderation and profitability to be impossible while watching Google pull off both.

I guess you've been ignoring watching Google squirm for years about moderation, they left China because of this. They've been fined for years in the EU for violating laws around this and privacy and this is only expected to get worse and more expensive for them. Moreso Google has deleted plenty of individuals/entities from the Googlesphere for questionable reasons that's leading to increased resentment over the years. Google hangouts/+ epically failed.

Google hasn't pulled off anything in the social media market other than losing money

tootie3• 4 years ago

I'm specifically thinking of YouTube. They run a massively profitable ad business, pay creators, sell a premium membership program with a clear value prop, and successfully moderate video content faster than Twitter can moderate text.

muglug2• 4 years ago

You can have decentralisation or you can have sub-second responses to whole-network search queries, but you cannot have both.

Twitter has two killer features: the people who use it, and search functionality that allows you to get near-instant results. Mastodon (and I assume Bluesky) cannot compete on either.

daniel_iversen• 4 years ago

The people is just about whichever platform has pull and influence, the architecture and missing out of full text search is something I’m sure people would be happy to live without. Not sure how much the average person searches on Twitter or Facebook (on tiktok and Instagram maybe they search more)

sempron64• 4 years ago

You absolutely can have sub-second responses to search queries for publically accessible decentralized content, if it is indexed by a regular search engine. That is what the web is.

Privately accessible content tends to be much smaller so local caching works. And if communication is not meant to be instant, email proves that a decentralized system works.

What gets a little more difficult is content that is widely available but behind login. Facebook has this but twitter and mastodon tend to not be this way.

In fact mastodon is a workable system for decentralized social networking, so I think the skepticism is unwarranted.

The only question in my mind is whether a popular social network can be effectively bootstrapped without a core capital incentive.

muglug2• 4 years ago

Google is reasonably centralised, though.

sliken2• 4 years ago

How many people care about seeing tweets from the last second vs last minute?

Or the difference between 95% of the results of a search and 100%, especially if the 95% is missing the least popular 5%.

mdmglr• 4 years ago

Is decentralization the silver bullet that solves the problems of social media? I don't think it is a technology problem.

tristan957• 4 years ago

Decentralization allows for different forms of moderation across instances and allows for instances to monetize how they want, whether that is pay to play, donations, or advertising.

I would argue those are 2 of the most pressing issues social media faces. Maybe others would disagree however.

gautamdivgi• 4 years ago

Wasn’t bluesky what parag agrawal was working on when he was an individual contributor at twitter?

faizshah• 4 years ago

I was looking at the code this past week and they are only using simple password auth: https://atproto.com/guides/applications#signing-in

I was hoping since identity is such a corner stone of this project that there would be a more fleshed out auth system (OIDC?).

Other than that it seems like a reasonable implementation, but I don’t like the addressing scheme.

They are using identifiers that look like emails: bluesky@bluesky.app

But they are not actually emails so they can collide with real emails.

pfraze7• 4 years ago

We don’t use email-style IDs; we use domain names (@alice.com) which will often be subdomains (@alice.host.com).

The auth schemes will evolve. That technique is meant for your main app.

Finnucane• 4 years ago

“I’m sorry I created a blight on humanity, but now I can fix it, with blockchain!”

Thanks, but no thanks.

whyrusleeping• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1583231719943327744

wan_ala• 4 years ago

How is this better than ActivityPub? Mastodon already is a decentralized Twitter

Jack Dorsey Unveils Bluesky Social, the Decentralized Twitter

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