I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

by serhack_ • 3 years ago

300 250 3 years ago

So not even 10,000 posts a day. Is it really worth having topics about a barren social network reach the homepage every day?

SeanAnderson3• 3 years ago

It's not even fully open to the public yet. I'm waitlisted. 10k post/day seems great for a closed alpha.

summarity• 3 years ago

Pretty good for 50k users (and keep in mind almost half a million downloads that can be converted into users)

iLoveOncall2• 3 years ago

50K posting users. I have an account but didn't post anything, like most people on any social media are lurkers.

gkoberger• 3 years ago

Yes. It's interesting, from a tech perspective, to a lot of people here based on its combination of the decentralized nature of the AT protocol combined with usability that seems to work for people (compared to Mastodon).

It's small, but it has a lot of interesting ideas behind the scenes and interesting people using it.

herval• 3 years ago

good ol' hackernews and its "it's a new startup, is it even worth talking about?" mob

debesyla• 3 years ago

Hackernews is also a social network - and it seems like this thing works with even less posts per day?

You don't need a huge following to have a functioning social group.

aurelius83• 3 years ago

I’d love for you to validate the users against the list of verified twitter 1.0 users and see what percentage migrated over.

navanchauhan• 3 years ago

Another metric I would be interested in looking is verified skeeters (people with a custom root domain) vs verified Twitter users and separate Twitter Blue subscribers (with < 1 million followers)

sbarre2• 3 years ago

Someone did post that stat last week (beta users who verified via domain) and if I recall it was under 10%?

mikece• 3 years ago

The fact that someone can download all posts on a social network tells you how little usage it has attracted.

skc• 3 years ago

It's still in closed Beta and invite only

XorNot• 3 years ago

Which broadly describes why things are going okay there. There isn't anything to moderate, there's no spam, there's no fixated person harrassment.

There's nothing hard being solved.

manojlds• 3 years ago

Eh, it's in a closed beta.

waboremo• 3 years ago

Even on large platforms you can (technically) download all posts. Might take some time and you might need to cycle some storage, but it's doable. So I don't really think that's a great metric to observe usage.

Ignoring that judging usage based on a still invite only platform is also a little silly.

capableweb12• 3 years ago

Would be interesting to see if your comment has any basis at all by comparing how things looked for Twitter at the same timescale, or Facebook, or any other social media.

Just to look at the numbers in isolation is hardly interesting.

ndriscoll2• 3 years ago

You can download all of the (public) posts and comments on Reddit. It's a ~2TB torrent.

visarga• 3 years ago

hmm... that makes it larger than RedPajama, a dataset of 1.2 trillion tokens

how much of reddit is being used for AI? it looks like there's plenty of text in there; maybe we just need to parse the reddit with GPT to filter out the good parts, and got a great dataset

est• 3 years ago

why would download posts be difficult to begin with?

You know in the past, the Internet were designed to be downloadablein the first place, like USENET, FTP, etc.

jeron• 3 years ago

Glad to know all 5 of my posts have been archived

olah_1• 3 years ago

Is there such a thing as private posts? or “friends only” posts or something? Or is it all public?

Hamuko5• 3 years ago

All public. There aren't even DMs. No private accounts either. I think some kind of private communication is on the roadmap.

repeekad• 3 years ago

Is there even a notion of “friends”? or is it more like Twitter where you only follow others who may follow you back

demarq• 3 years ago

Next challenge make incremental updates to the archive

latchkey• 3 years ago

I signed into it and there was a meme about posting pictures of butts. Apparently porn still drives the internet.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

That google leak about AI, part of their reasoning is civitai and stable diffusion.

The subtext is “we can’t compete with AI because it’s all porn and thus super popular”.

ShamelessC2• 3 years ago

Are you referring to the blog post from an individual employee? Not really a leak per se. or was there something else that I missed?

SeanAnderson3• 3 years ago

I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.

I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.

C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.

Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!

I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.

tbalsam• 3 years ago

I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to, to be honest.

Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)

sneak2• 3 years ago

People seem to be generally anti-social-media and, furthermore, anti-social-media-magnate.

I'm a fan of publishing. I think any-to-any publishing is one of the most important applications of the internet.

barnabee3• 3 years ago

Agreed.

The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content to everyone.

I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues) probably got more right than others.

There’s a lot further to go before we perfect this, but Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.

capableweb12• 3 years ago

I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.

One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO.

Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the founder himself consider a failure with the experience of inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create something cool.

But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.

RheingoldRiver• 3 years ago

I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark.

I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your League of Legends chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I doubt it still works, Riot's completely remade their client since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.

grimgrin• 3 years ago

I'm happy it exists too. By far my favorite discussion about it was Oxide's last podcast:

https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/blue-skies-...

Emily Kisane was on the ep, following their piece that blew up https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.

wnevets4• 3 years ago

I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.

Isn't it just a variation of mastodon?

detaro6• 3 years ago

no.

jug• 3 years ago

I'm also trying to stay positive.

In that spirit, I really enjoy:

1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common.

2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind.

3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent.

4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered.

5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.

boringg• 3 years ago

I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As they grow quality erodes.

chefandy2• 3 years ago

I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs.

It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.

vidarh2• 3 years ago

If they are truly open, it'll get bridged to the Fediverse the way people started bridging to Twitter (but were shut down because Twitter doesn't want to be open), and anything good about the protocols will be adopted whole or on part and subsumed.

Which to me makes it just stupid of them to start from scratch rather than starting with interop with the Fediverse and optionally making breaking changes and/or bridging themselves.

E.g. the ability to migrate data more easily is great, but also easily accommodated by a combination of adding a new URI scheme and provide rewriting proxies to federate with ActivityPub instances that don't support it.

It feels like a lot of NIH and desire to be in control that I feel are at odds with building an open ecosystem.

jordanreger• 3 years ago

+1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is free and open and will always be that way, but they build products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.

snickerbockers3• 3 years ago

TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network.

And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.

gfodor3• 3 years ago

Mastodon is filling a niche, because it has to. Bluesky is designed to one day swallow Twitter.

barnabee3• 3 years ago

This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at.

Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.)

Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”.

Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.

That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.

naet• 3 years ago

Maybe some folks like yourself thought Twitter was terrible before, but plenty of people were happy enough until certain changes by Musk. Mastodon itself had a large growth recently as people left Twitter in response.

I had an automated bot running for a long time on Twitter that I was happy with, until recently when API access was cut off. Now I'm looking for a new platform for my bot to run on as a direct result of recent controversial policy change. Maybe it will be Mastodon or Bluesky, or maybe something else. I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter was than Mastodon currently is for my needs.

mcv• 3 years ago

I'm especially interested in what their new protocol offers that ActivityPub doesn't. There are more protocols than just ActivityPub, like Zot6 which focuses a lot more on nomadic identity than ActivityPub does. I'd love to know what it is that makes BlueSky's protocol better and therefore worth adding. Because if it doesn't do anything that other protocols already do, then what's the point?

nl• 3 years ago

Twitter remains a great and useful social network if you stay in the right circles.

ML Twitter is fantastic for example.

DoItToMe81• 3 years ago

Which Mastodon instances would you recommend? Most of the ones I've seen have a very Twitterish attitude.

NetOpWibby• 3 years ago

Positivity…about Bluesky…on HN?! Incredible.

If nothing else, Bluesky is a breath of fresh air. I’ve found some overlap of people trashing Bluesky to then asking for an invite LOL.

stjohnswarts• 3 years ago

I lot of people hate themselves and the world and complain about everything. I wouldn't worry too much about what the HN unimind thinks about something.

realitysballs• 3 years ago

Did you read any content of top posts shown in the article ? …it is quite toxic stuff. Seems like foreshadow . Hate to kill optimism though.

mushbino• 3 years ago

A worse Twitter? The amount of blatant racism, bigotry, and calls for violence have exploded in the past couple of months. These people all buy blue checks so they get amplified. It's insane. My bluesky invite cannot come soon enough.

nonameking2026• 3 years ago

I haven’t seen this…

https://youtu.be/g1na0OFm89k

pabs34• 3 years ago

Pidgin still interfaces with everything, including walled gardens like Facebook :)

https://pidgin.im/plugins/

SeanAnderson3• 3 years ago

Holy moly, you just made my day. I will have to give it a shot. I thought that once all the walled gardens developed their own protocols that it was dead in the water!

danjac• 3 years ago

If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.

However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.

mort963• 3 years ago

I don't understand why they wouldn't implement ActivityPub-federation. Instead of strengthening the best federated social network, they chose to undermine it. Why?

joelg• 3 years ago

on bluesky (sorry) the devs have been super active and responsive and eager to explain their approach. they have talked about this specific choice at length - that after an extensive ecosystem review and lots of thought, it seemed like a different architecture had a better chance of working at scale. I hope they find the time to explain this more publicly but it’s definitely a decision they didn’t make lightly.

More generally, I have a ton of respect for the standardization process and for the amount of (mostly volunteer!) engineering over the years that had gone into fediverse, but it’s been so long and growth has been so slow that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a new project to try something different.

floor_• 3 years ago

Better to be critical of a product in beta than have toxic positivity about it so things can be fixed.

tsuujin• 3 years ago

I’m excited for blue sky just because I’m excited to see movement in real alternatives to the couple of major social players.

I also wish I could actually get an invite to BS. I’ve been waiting a long time and they seem unlikely to actually hand it out at this point.

tiffanyg• 3 years ago

Lol, this is HN. Comments are often incredibly negative, and frequently enough - wrong or not quite right, yet arrogant &/ opinionated etc.

Others taught me long ago to try to keep something of a 'critical eye' turned on whenever I'm reading news etc. I try not to judge simply for the sake of judging, nor let past impressions completely overwhelm info right in front of me, but having some sort of basic impression / expectation of people, journals, newspapers, websites, etc. is helpful in avoiding some time wastage and filling my mind up with (more) utter nonsense.

I end up disagreeing with / doubting many comments on HN, yet still get a LOT out of reading even those comments - just in the sense of sort of the 'zeitgeist' and what sorts of BS I'm likely to come upon elsewhere.

... IMAO (in my arrogant opinion)

areoform2• 3 years ago

Bluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to philanthropists.

bombcar4• 3 years ago

All invite-only early-access things that get hot are like it; once they go to general availability they go to shit, it seems.

neltnerb• 3 years ago

It's so predictable that it's frustrating to see people who should know better falling for it. Of course it's a fresh feel without the trolls. It's not open to all yet, so of course it is.

I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously.

Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).

dannyphantom• 3 years ago

There was a post here about a year ago that summarizes this pretty well[1]; I've honestly gone back to read it a few times for my own projects as it offers some good perspective and framing.

My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content. To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363953

criddell• 3 years ago

Maybe it should stay invite-only?

I’m not on and am waiting for an invite, but if opening the gates means it ends up being a place I don’t want to be, what’s the point?

amelius• 3 years ago

What is Bluesky?

e4e5• 3 years ago

Considering there's no explication on bluesky's website, i don't understand why this comment is downvoted

mullingitover• 3 years ago

So far it seems to be Mastodon, with some tweaks, and the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server. This addresses the critical flaw people point out with Mastodon, which is that because it requires you to choose a server it's too confusing. The requirement to choose a hosting provider is why email famously never took off.

Philadelphia• 3 years ago

Email started off as something you only got through your ISP. It then turned into something you only got through Google. It’s not really an example of a service where the vast majority of people make an active choice.

snickerbockers3• 3 years ago

the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server

has the federation even been implemented? Is it an open protocol? Why on earth should anybody trust them not to go back on their word once they've gotten enough critical mass that nobody wants to leave because that's where their friends are (the so-called "network effect")?

brundolf3• 3 years ago

It's structured very differently from Mastodon. Please stop repeating this meme without any firsthand knowledge

Jupe• 3 years ago

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/05/what-is-bluesky-everything...

blitzar2• 3 years ago

Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves.

This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

btown3• 3 years ago

Given that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully public and easy to extract into a database: https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb...

On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence. (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name - is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.)

I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's tough to do in a federated system, but research like https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.

capableweb12• 3 years ago

It's a tough line to walk. On one hand, if you participate in a system where almost everything is inherently public (the web/internet, since anyone can screenshot anything and publish wherever they want), it's hardly unexpected that information that was once public, can remain public forever.

On the other hand, people have some sort of expectation that the data they publicly post online to remain in some sort of semi-private state. Bluesky app might invite only for now, but the underlying protocol and technology makes everything very public, forever, and makes it trivial to cache locally (for good or bad purposes).

btown3• 3 years ago

There's a vast difference between "public" and "actively surfaced." Indeed, blocking someone on Twitter would not prevent them from finding your public profile in an incognito window and seeing your posts - it would simply prevent your posts from being easily and automatically accessible to them in their feed. In practice, this tends to reduce conflict. My concern with Bluesky is that it makes it very possible for tools to make block information easily and automatically accessible - in fact, it would allow a bad actor to create a service that shows a feed of just content from people who want to block you from seeing it. That's a recipe for disaster.

brundolf3• 3 years ago

(Saying this as an excited bluesky user and someone who really really hopes all of this succeeds long-term)

I think possibly their biggest challenge ahead will be making parts of it non-public. Private mutes/blocks, having some analogue of Circles for whitelisting post viewers, etc.

Having a truly open and public database - especially once signups no longer require invite codes - is going to mean a cambrian explosion of tools and clients the likes of which we've never seen before in social media (which is already sorta happening even with closed signups). But that might include malicious apps that take advantage of that same openness to stalk, spam, and harass (especially given it's coinciding with a huge leap in AI technology). It might be AT Protocol's biggest test.

VancouverMan• 3 years ago

Maybe it'd be better to just not have any blocking/muting built into such a system at all.

If User A doesn't want to see posts from User B, that's fine. User A can have his client filter them out locally, prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed. Nobody else has to know this is happening.

I don't think that User A should be permitted to prevent User B from replying to User A's posts, which in turn prevents User C (or all other users) from discovering what User B thinks about whatever User A posted.

User A trying to prevent his otherwise-public posts from being visible to User B seems pointless to me, as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked, or ask somebody else who hasn't been blocked to screenshot it, or use some other way around it.

zimpenfish4• 3 years ago

User A can have his client filter them out locally

We've been trying that with email and spam for the last 3 decades and I've got to tell you the results are not good.

prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed.

A has to download the harassment from B just to then filter it locally? Seems like you're putting the onus on A here to do the work. What happens if B sends enough to DOS A's link? Or sends CSAM and now A is committing a crime just by downloading the content?

as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked

Which increases the friction on B if they want to harass A - this is good! We want to make harassment as friction-full as possible!

btown3• 3 years ago

The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A.

If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!

ketzo• 3 years ago

This works for one user against one shitty troll.

I think if we have learned literally nothing else, it’s that social media moderation is hard, and the server is going to have to do some work.

It just can’t be only on users to locally block shit. It doesn’t work.

panarky• 3 years ago

otherwise-public posts

If the platform is pseudonymous and allows individuals to create multiple identities, such that it's trivial for those you block to view your posts from a different identity, or even by not logging in at all, then "blocking" isn't really blocking anybody except the lazy and the ignorant.

In fact, since most users don't think it through this far, even providing such a fake "block" function is inherently deceptive and user-hostile.

notatoad• 3 years ago

there's no reason you can't filter privately in the client as well, if you have a client that wants to prioritize privacy. but blocking/muting seems like a reasonable thing to include in the protocol, for clients that are prioritizing resources and not ingesting more posts than they need to and as a signal for algorithms to determine users who are frequently blocked or muted.

for somebody like myself, i'm just some dude nobody cares about. my twitter blocklist was major public figures who i didn't want to see retweets of in my feed. donald trump wasn't going to get angry at me because i blocked him, it's fine if that's included in some public list.

specialist2• 3 years ago

All the recommender and curation features should be done by the client, on the client.

We had offline mail readers for BBS, CompuServe, BIX, etc.

One feature I truly miss is the TWIT filter. I could block u/VancouverMan and you'd be none the wiser.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 3 years ago

I'm writing a fairly basic social media app, right now.

The target demographic is very security/privacy-sensitive, so we have discussions about stuff like this, all the time.

If you block someone, they have no idea, except that you disappear from their radar. Even that, only came about, after a long discussion. Before, blocking someone simply meant that we could not see them, but they could see us.

My location is something that I can force off (meaning that no one can find me in location searches). Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square.

All visibility/security is enforced at the server. If possible, in SQL, so it never even makes it into the server code. Having API access buys you nothing.

gpm• 3 years ago

Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square.

I hope the implementation of this isn't that I can start sampling your location repeatedly and average them out to find out where you live?

m3kw93• 3 years ago

Of course you have an idea who blocked, in twitter if you block someone they can’t see your content when you visit their profile. The mute on the other hand just filters from timeline

mkl• 3 years ago

Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square.

You may want to expand that in lower population density areas. If there's only one little town in that 10km square the fuzzing does almost nothing.

gfody• 3 years ago

isn't the whole point of making this a decentralized protocol to be able to have nuanced access policies that you can trust are actually enforced? if I'm participating in this protocol and someone requests my blocklist shouldn't that request get routed to my node which would respond according to my preferences which might be some choice like ignore them, answer them, lie to them, ask me, etc. depending if the request came from a contact, stranger, friend, foe, corporation, or whatever?

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

No, this is quite a good thing, although it will lead to new kinds of information warfare.

m3kw93• 3 years ago

The blocked user would know most of the time if they were active in viewing the account that blocked. It’s not a problem, or that they’d eventually know.

chillbill• 3 years ago

You’re being too dramatic about it… it’s not that big of a deal.

riedel• 3 years ago

Don't know how much it is wort, but also GDPR applies. So you need a legal basis for processing (at least data from EU citizens). That could well be journalism or scientific research, but for anything else it probably should be compatible with the expectation of the users. Fines have been typically rare and low for 'illegal' processing of twitter data. However, also blue sky and any other federating entity could face a legal risk if they do not protect that data reasonably against misuse.

oneeyedpigeon2• 3 years ago

I think it's useful to have different networks with different rules - that way, we learn about what works and what doesn't. Twitter still has the behaviour you discuss here with people screenshotting pages showing someone blocked them, and publicising them.

I'd like a social network that's much more public, to compare it's results with twitter, etc. I'm thinking non-anonymous identities and fully public records of votes, etc.

bnewbold2• 3 years ago

some quick thoughts/notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this isn't an official policy statement):

- content on bluesky is public, but we have not set expectations/comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public web"

- the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions

- the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps

- obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it does signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial/non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar

- blobs/images are not included in this corpus

- this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public

- private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy/security concerns with non-public content

- there are some other cool projects, like https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API

brundolf3• 3 years ago

Thanks for weighing in

It's disappointing to hear that follower-only/circles (whitelisted viewers) posts are basically incompatible with the current protocol. I'd hoped something could be done where the post content was encrypted in such a way that only specific authenticated users could decrypt it, or something along those lines

capableweb12• 3 years ago

It doesn't sound too hard to layer on top of AT Proto. You already have cryptographic building blocks so you can encrypt content for specific users, I'd guess the only thing that is missing having something like that is the actual UI.

But I haven't done a deep-dive into the protocol, just a surface glance so far.

afiori3• 3 years ago

From what I gather it looks like this feature would not be a good fit for the current architecture.

areoform2• 3 years ago

As a team member, one request that I do have is that don't make Clubhouse's mistake. Someone once told me that Clubhouse was like a house party, where your behavior reflected on who invited you. So it kept the initial community quality high.

The minute Clubhouse removed that invite-only policy, the community died very quickly and everything was replaced by the worst sludge imaginable.

I think you should keep the invite structure, and increase the number of invites to positive users/communities (as you already do!). And use the graph that naturally forms to inform content moderation.

Social shame is a strong motivator that hasn't been properly deployed by a platform yet (mobs on twitter don't count). What I'm thinking about is that if someone you invited directly does something horrible like, posts slurs to a user, then the inviter should also get a notice that their invitee was a horrible human being. And if this inviter's invites end up being toxic people, then it may be a good idea to prune that branch of the tree.

This structure will limit growth, necessarily, but it will also give you time to solidify a new kind of structure and a new kind of experiment in social media.

I think it is possible to have a high-quality social network that scales.

Also, please for the love of god, I want to get my mom to use the platform, can you make sure that stuff doesn't break containment?

thealchemistdev2• 3 years ago

Social solutions to social problems. Perfect!

specialist2• 3 years ago

where your behavior reflected on who invited you

Ages ago, I suggested that slashdot (or successor) adopt a mafia-style system of vouching. So that members police their own.

I invite you to slashdot, so your reputation (karma, whatever) impacts my own. In a way, you become my responsibility. To protect my own rep, I may have to kick you off the system.

If you in turn invite others, they also factor into my rep. Kicking you off would also kick off all your invites. And so on.

verdverm3• 3 years ago

How do you intend to prevent someone from manipulating their mirror? Are users signing their messages before publishing to a data server? It is unclear from the documentation.

bnewbold2• 3 years ago

all public account content is in a "repo", commits to the repo are signed, and the identity resolution mechanism gives anybody the current/active signing key.

the most direct analogy is to signed git commits. this is an intentional design decision compared to signing individual messages/posts/etc. A "proof" for a single record in the repo is the commit, the record, and the chain of merkle tree nodes connecting the two.

OJFord• 3 years ago

Last time I saw bsky on HN a maintainer shared a skip-waitlist invitation code ('anyone on HN is probably better behaved than some of the trolls we've dealt with', or something to that effect) - which was unfortunately dead by the time I found it। Any chance of an encore? Or I am on the waitlist: something I don't recall at username dot com।

capableweb12• 3 years ago

teddyfrozevelt• 3 years ago

Did you sign an invite code using the key in their bio? That's so neat! I'm not sure if you have more, but I'm also on the waitlist (bluesky@owen.sh) and would love to check it out.

blitzar2• 3 years ago

Finally PGP finds its niche!

skneko• 3 years ago

For no apparent reason, here you can find my key ;P http://pgp.rediris.es:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xF7662...

gfodor3• 3 years ago

Ok. Now someone fine tune llama on this and then you’ll be able to understand how you’ll have a custom social user agent that shields you from toxic people and moderates on your behalf.

doodlesdev• 3 years ago

What are the advantages of ATProto over ActivityPub? I don't get it, if you want to make a decentralized social network why not go with the standardized, working, protocol? What does ATProto offer over ActivityPub?

Hamuko5• 3 years ago

Character limits for one thing.

  "text": {
      "type": "string",
      "maxLength": 3000,
      "maxGraphemes": 300
  }

https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-feed#appbskyfeedpost

detaro6• 3 years ago

How is that a benefit over ActivityPub? Hard-coding a post size limit in the protocol seems like a negative thing to me?

citruscomputing• 3 years ago

The mastodon server I use has a max length of 5k characters, so not really.

doublepg23• 3 years ago

I’m sure it will make them a lot of VC money.

steveklabnik4• 3 years ago

There aren’t any VCs involved, so.

ZacnyLos• 3 years ago

Apparently Mastodon's decentralisation works better.

detaro6• 3 years ago

Bluesky doesn't have any yet, so that's kind of obvious. How bluesky fares once it gets there remains to be seen.

remram• 3 years ago

The download link is dead. Maybe someone should put this on BitTorrent/IPFS/... and share a magnet here?

absentmoon• 3 years ago

I assume the bandwidth was too costly. It seems to be archived on Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20230509042606/https://worthdoin...

snowoutside• 3 years ago

It's very interesting they are using camelCase for their Postgres column names instead of snake_case. I like it.

Is that something folks are doing? Can it be done without "doubleQuoting" all of the response column names or without using an ORM?

ed25519FUUU2• 3 years ago

Probably using Java or similar so the columns are easier to serialize.

steveklabnik4• 3 years ago

They're using TypeScript.

ShamelessC2• 3 years ago

That’s very interesting? Not trying to be rude, just seems very mundane to me.

kbumsik• 3 years ago

Slightly off topic, but it seems that "cid" for identifier along with URI.

How cid is generated? Is it completely random?

progval• 3 years ago

it's a hash: https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

Hm, I thought 'order by' clause took a column name, not a table sub-expression.

8organicbits• 3 years ago

That's so much smaller than I expected. Mastodon stats claim 1.1B posts [1]. Both are growing fast, but I'm surprised by that gap.

[1] https://the-federation.info/

input_sh• 3 years ago

Why are you surprised by that? Mastodon is older, a lot more ironed out (in its own quirky ways), actually open to the public, and bot-friendly. Of course it's orders of magnitude more popular at this point in time.

That said, even though I'm rooting for Mastodon, I would not be shocked if Bluesky catches up very quickly. In any case, any of the two is an improvement over a locked down and thoroughly broken Twitter.

glenstein4• 3 years ago

Right, Blue sky is invite only, and has just started out. And like you, I strongly prefer Mastodon, but if Blue sky helps organize us into a post Twitter world so much the better.

capableweb12• 3 years ago

Bluesky just existed for a short while so far, it's to be expected.

What would be more interesting would be to compare Mastodon with bluesky when Mastodon was as old as bluesky is now.

Is this something someone can figure out?

parasti• 3 years ago

Twitter was not going up in flames when Mastodon came out, so that wouldn't make for a fair comparison.

pyaamb• 3 years ago

Prediction: If Bluesky gains any sort of traction, Elon will kill it.

capableweb12• 3 years ago

Question: How exactly could Elon kill a open protocol?

Nasreddin_Hodja2• 3 years ago

Adding support of other open protocol to Twitter, ActivityPub for example.

chrsw• 3 years ago

QRD on the foundation of all this? Bluesky is a company that built a social media network on top of their proprietary "@" (at) protocol?

sbarre2• 3 years ago

AT Protocol is open source, so not proprietary.

My understanding is that Bluesky as a company is building a client experience, and funding the development of the protocol, but the long term vision is for open source and federation, so no central controlling entity.

In fact there are already several other open source competing clients that can be used with the private beta, and Bluesky (currently) has no issue with this.

steveklabnik4• 3 years ago

BlueSky itself is already open source and on GitHub. Paul was doing a live stream of himself working on it today, even.

0xDEF• 3 years ago

One of the main reasons I'm still on twitter is because of how you can mute certain topics/words and accounts. Extensively using that has turned twitter into a source of learning and knowledge for me. I have also used uBlock to block the trending sidebar.

aszantu• 3 years ago

Would like to get invited

I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

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