Bluesky Is Building the Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-decentralized-social-media-jack-dorsey-wants-even-if-he-doesnt-realize-it/

by steveklabnik • 2 years ago

49 48 2 years ago

techdirt.com

hn_acker• 2 years ago

The full title (too long for HN) is

Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It

tedunangst2• 2 years ago

That does change the meaning somewhat.

steveklabnik4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I wasn't allowed to submit the original title, even though I tried to, and figured that dang would get to it if the thread got traction. I'm actually not 100% sure what the best course of option would be in this situation, but maybe I'm just not very imaginative with editing.

Arnt2• 2 years ago

I like bluesky, but how does one Discovery those fine feeds?

steveklabnik4• 2 years ago

They have a link that you can share like any other link. Here's one of my favorite feeds: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/feed/infreq

But there's also https://bsky.app/feeds, which lets you search through them, and shows a list of some (I'm assuming) popular ones.

Arnt2• 2 years ago

Neat. How did you find that first feed?

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

Wish they had a similar discovery page for labellers too. I'd like to enable more "gimmicky" ones than I have, like "beans remover" that tags any posted photos containing beans.

DANmode• 2 years ago

Learn, or relearn, proper search skills.

RACEWAR2• 2 years ago

I'm at a point where I do not understand why social media is such a big deal™, with the exception of the prioritization of sharing breaking news and things like that. Otherwise, I'm at a loss trying to figure out why talk over platforms and protocols is significant. Much of it must have something to do with liberal ideals over the right to self-expression/speech and social media as the premier communications method. Yet still, I remain at a loss...

throwaway8943453• 2 years ago

For me it’s that it seems increasingly absurd that a handful of companies control such a large share of speech. I’m not a leftist even by American standards, but I see the current social media landscape as a privatization of the public square and this actually is a problem space that can be solved by the right protocols. We were blessed with open networking and web protocols many decades ago; we should also have open social protocols IMHO.

tmottabr4• 2 years ago

The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square..

Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together.

The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads.

In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people.

Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation).

Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later.

The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square.

Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then.

And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos.

Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.

j45• 2 years ago

Some people before social media arrived wondered the same thing. Having so many people in one place was a spectacle and something to see, but before that smaller communities whether they were forums or something else were generally a lot more fun.

CuriousCosmic4• 2 years ago

A list of reasons from my POV:

- The loss of the 3rd place in America due to commercialization of public spaces

- A lot of communities depend on social media for their existence. Ex: artists depend on social media networking for their livelihood. Traditionally they'd depend on a wealthy patron to support them but nowadays they support themselves off of a bunch of moderately well off patrons. The same applies to many types of musicians, content creators, etc.

- Social media presence and networking is weirdly important in the FOSS space for patronage so nowadays a lot of devs lean on it as well.

- Social media has become a support network for a lot of people. Jokingly said where everyone lends around the same 20 dollars.

- Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.

- Social media is really important for Open Source Intelligence.

EA-3167• 2 years ago

That feels like a list of the best things social media offers, but not the typical use case. The typical use case seems to be arguing, trolling, toxicity, and showing off.

RACEWAR2• 2 years ago

This is a solid list. Thanks.

prmoustache4• 2 years ago

- Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.

I don't really see much "niche communities" striving on social medias really. There are less of them, but there are still a lot of old school forums which I believe still do a better job for small communities. I am still connecting almost daily to 2 of them + a few others more infrequently. I think the oldest was created in 1998. It is much smaller than at its peak but if you look at statistics it has been showing stable activity in the last 10 years with the usual seasonal variations (much lower activity in summer). I think there is still a place for those.

petre2• 2 years ago

Propadanda, ads, marketing, oragnising meetings and protests, breaking news.

leandrod• 2 years ago

ActivityPub was to be the federal social network, but cancel culture balkanised it.

mattl2• 2 years ago

How so?

meepmorp• 2 years ago

"People who don't want to read my bullshit are the real Nazis."

polski-g• 2 years ago

Imagine if Yahoo Mail blocked all of Gmail because someone who used the latter posted A Racisms™ to Google Docs.

That is ActivityPub.

hresvelgr• 2 years ago

I think Jack's ideal of a social square is fundamentally at odds with the reality of how these social squares actually behave past a certain scale, especially with regards to moderation. Bluesky's approach to decentralised moderation has been really interesting to watch and seems to be working quite well. Granted, I don't think users should be responsible for it to the extent that they currently are, but it seems to be effective.

pyinstallwoes• 2 years ago

No it's not.

mvkel2• 2 years ago

Calling social media a "public square," isn't a valid analogy, and is an impossible ideal to live up to.

Nothing about it works the same way an actual public square does.

It's a coliseum.

rchaud• 2 years ago

The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to share information as the state had turned off SMS texts. This led to wall-to-wall coverage on US news channels as Iran is of course denoted as an enemy state, and here was Twitter, an American social network helping spread free speech. This would happen again in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring.

mvkel2• 2 years ago

It's wild that a one-time convenient excuse turned into the base expectation of all social media that is impossible to live up to.

People are weird.

winternett• 2 years ago

There are so many sites that all follow the same template... To sell sponsorships & ads and to companies, and then slap the illusion that public participation is vibrant. The only good model for a social site these days are smaller communities specialized around a niche, like specific cars or musician communities based on genres.

Even back in the day, people had extensive problems with community forums because operators usually worked based on collusion and favoritism and ad profit. There are far too many agendas involved in major "social" communities, and social is in quotes, because if you look at the tools dedicated to communication on these platforms, they barely facilitate communication and connection beyond public fandom, a lot of that is based on bot traffic.

If you look at live streaming, a ton of generic comments flood celebrity sessions, many operate chat bots to make their live streaming sessions look "active" with users. I think users are now beginning to wise up to the façade that social media is not really helpful once it grows big.

Bluesky Is Building the Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants

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