If you're curious why every username is a domain, it's because users are sites

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y

by consumer451 • 2 years ago

81 56 2 years ago

consumer45111• 2 years ago

Original post/thread:

If you're curious why everybody's username is a domain, it's because every user is essentially a website
A common thought by devs is "couldn't you make a social network using RSS" and we basically went... yeah let's try that premise with some tweaks
Apps like Bluesky are aggregators. They crawl around the atmosphere like a search engine would the crawl the web, but instead of making a search app it makes a social app
When you post something, like something, make a reply, you're just publishing json on your site, and then that gets synced out in an event stream too
It's pretty weird that you can do it that way -- but you can!
The post I'm replying to now has a URL under my site. It's:
at://pfrazee.com/app.bsky.feed.post/3l6xwohhgax2x
This is how Bluesky is decentralized. In the same way that you can switch search engines and see the same web, you can switch social apps and see the same atmosphere.
It's because everybody's got their own site

The thread continues ...

Channeling dang: hey all, please try to keep this about the technology.

remram2• 2 years ago

If users are not trying to be sites, then it's not a feature.

consumer45111• 2 years ago

I am generally on the side of product/usability. Nobody cares about the underlying protocol.

However, the more I learn about what Jay, Paul, and team are doing, the more I realize that the protocol is actually important. Them being federated protocol nerds, while also having to focus on supporting millions of users is super interesting to watch unfold. This could be really cool because they really thought about the underlying factors, from go.

There are many user issues like "when I block someone, they should no longer follow me" which seem so simple from a user POV, but are actually complex from the federated protocol POV. I am learning a lot by watching what happens here.

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

It's not a feature yet for most users.

As possibilities expand, the "ATmostphere" can be improved. Maybe in two years everyone wants to go to a new Personal Data-Store that offers new features X or Y, or Bluesky is sucking because of Z...

This architecture of making users sovereign is what's really at stake with the 'user = site' idea; the meaning of that is powerful & clear to techies for what it ongoingly unlocks & enables, but most users arent expected to share that technical fervor. It insures the ATmosphere doesn't get trapped or corralled into some local maxima, can't be enshittified since there isn't the same switching cost as all other networks. And it enables growth & extension of the ATmosphere, by allowing innovation at the edge.

More generally, I'd argue that users don't have to be familiar with and attracted to features for them to be features. No one knows every function in their spreadsheet software and there's some they probably will never use, but the spreadsheet is known & respected because it has such a broad library of functions to enable so so much calculating, in so many different ways. Users can grow & change where they are in the adoption curve over time.

Features evolve on healthy & fetile platforms. Giving users sovereignty & mobility enables new platform to be created off-Bluesky/main: it is a meta-feature to allow new features.

oddevan• 2 years ago

Some sites are personal sites. Some sites are for organizations or companies or events.

If that doesn't work, just substitute "account" for "user". "Every bluesky account is a site."

paulgb• 2 years ago

Every podcast is an RSS feed. Most podcast listeners don’t care about that aspect, but they still get the advantage of every podcast app having essentially the same set of content (compared to, say, YouTube for video or Audible for audiobooks, each of which have the lion’s share of content).

remram2• 2 years ago

That's right. And if users want push notifications or search and you say "that's not possible, because every podcast is an RSS feed"... You have not explained anything, you have not satisfied them with an explanation, and you are ultimately wrong about it being impossible.

It's an implementation detail not a feature, and if it started getting in the way of what users need podcasts to do, we would change it not hide behind it. Just like there's no reason for one account per domain other than "that's what we went with for now".

arghandugh2• 2 years ago

It’s been almost two years of Bluesky being a comprehensively better microblogging experience with stronger integrity guarantees than Twitter, and it’s still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU.

The unfortunate lesson learned is that nowadays only a very small percentage of social media users will switch to an equivalent platform for ideological, ethical, or practical reasons. Disruption of the incumbent is required.

consumer45111• 2 years ago

Disruption of the incumbent is required.

In this case, the incumbent is disrupting themself.

The X/Twitter block feature change appears to be an even bigger event than being banned in Brazil, according to usage stats. [0]

It's like the great Digg migration, but just 1-5% of the user base, over time. Each time, the network effects affect.

[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

pessimizer• 2 years ago

stronger integrity guarantees

What does this even mean? Bluesky is less likely to mangle your posts? I didn't think that any of the services had issues with data loss.

theptip• 2 years ago

In the social media business, “integrity” generally means policing hate speech/abuse/bullying/…

arghandugh2• 2 years ago

It is highly tamper resistant.

Your account (authorized domain) resolves to your DID from a public catalog which resolves to your PDS server.

Anyone can talk directly to any PDS and replay and cryptographically verify every single post, like, and asset. It’s intentionally difficult to tamper with anyone’s speech, and any identity change operations get rolled into your crypto so any malicious break in your events can be identified and rolled back.

akkartik• 2 years ago

The lesson to learn is that to do anything in this world it takes persistence in addition to everything else. No matter how much better you are.

https://paulgraham.com/die.html

wpm• 2 years ago

At this point once Twitter becomes unbearable (and its fast approaching that), I'm going to do a data export, nuke my account, and move on with my life, not rush to replace it. I likely never would replace it.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Right, the incumbent is all but trying to drive people away but can't even do it. In the 2000s, deliberate and conscientious users still made up a big enough part of the audience that they could swing a migration away from MySpace or Digg. Today the internet is made up of the whole population, period. They're overall too passive and docile to look for something better.

toofy• 2 years ago

there are likely tens of thousands of sites who dream of having 2 million active users.

other than a few VC heads, in no world is millions of dailies a bad thing. i’d be shocked if hn had 2 million daily. and thank your god it’s not full of everyone screaming at once. it’s what makes it such a rad place to be.

i moved to mastodon when the infosec community migrated there and honestly, its OmgSoMuchBetter that it has less people. it’s like here on hn, the signal to noise ratio is fucking glorious.

i’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past, but in reality we (people) prefer multiple different spaces, and for very very good reasons.

it i want a quiet night with a fancy dinner, i’ll go to a quiet nicer restaurant.

if i want a loud night out with the friends, we go to a club.

if i want a goth night i go to the goth club

if i want to hear blues i go to a blues bar.

etc…

the big sites suffer from their own ridiculousness and still, years later haven’t figured out that trying to be everything at once is hilariously stupid. it just makes you bad at everything.

blue sky is incredible, at least until eternal september hits. Mastodon’s different servers hit so much better than the last years of twitter did. the minute everyone flocks to either of them, im out. we like different spaces for different moods, it’s common sense.

could you imagine how awful going out would be if you’re talkin with your friends and over and over some totally random people were constantly coming to your table and screaming shit at you? “defend yourself!” … no, because that’s not normal… bar owners would be like “bro, that guy who keeps screaming at random people has to go… fuckin weirdo.”

that’s the experience these same group of VC people keep trying to tell us is normal and what we should want. no thanks. thats weird af.

godelski3• 2 years ago

So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0].

I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for.

[0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)

tourmalinetaco• 2 years ago

This is why the death of fansites and forums was so huge. Instead of that quiet restaurant or blues bar we were all shoved into a dingy fast food joint and crammed together like sardines with robotic staff who do everything in their power to keep us in the joint as long as possible, even if we’re all hangry and throwing things. Really the only problem I had with forums is finding new ones, and that’s probably the only thing Reddit did right was ease of creating and finding communities.

JauntTrooper• 2 years ago

I think Threads is disrupting Twitter fairly well... it's at 200 million+ monthly active users and growing.

I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

Disruption of the incumbent is required.

State your case. You have an audience here, now sell us on your idea.

godelski3• 2 years ago

  > still struggling to sustain 2 million DAU.

Is this a problem?

Seriously. Do we need every service to have a billion users? I'm glad there's places that are open to everyone, but at the same time I'm sad that a lot of smaller and niche places have disappeared. Those are the places I've found communities. It's possible on bigger sites but it's much harder. Your voice is one in a billion, it's not much better than having no voice. It's even happened more as HN has grown. And in any of these big places it's more likely that sensational posts rise to the top drowning out sensible or accurate messages (maximizing engagement doesn't maximize user happiness, communication, community, nor many other things). It's also harder to communicate because every community develops their own language and priors. A mutual understanding and that's what builds good faith conversations. I think if we've learned anything from these mega sites it's that even when people use their real names they still view themselves as "anonymous" (and conversely, in small sites people can hide their name, but it means something to the community, and they still have a reputation to defend)

I'm not convinced we are measuring the right things. It just feels like people are measuring what they think they should, and are not thinking about what the actual goals are. These are not the same thing. But that's Goodhart's Law I guess

Gud• 2 years ago

No, not a problem at all.

Quite the opposite in fact. I think the world is much better if we avoid forming authoritarian corporate media platforms with some dickhead billionaire in charge.

I host my own social media platform with one active daily user plus two guys who signed up when I spam others Show HN posts. Link is in my profile.

I prefer the bazaar any day. And im the guy selling my wares from a carpet on the street, don’t even have a fancy booth

Sorry for rambling

pfraze4• 2 years ago

I agree with this. I think we've managed to produce a good UX on a new protocol, which is important but not what the market measures us by. The market is looking for great products. That's going to take us improving at design execution as an org. I've said this before on HN; I'm sure you can find it in my history.

We started as a protocol design company. Shifting to a product & services company has been a process, and "moving quickly" as a new org in an established market-space is a comical challenge. We got pitted against Threads, which was able to reuse the scaling and moderation infra of Insta and take on 100M signups in their first week. The only way to be competitive here is to find a differentiated & novel execution which finds PMF.

The protocol work is the PBC mission, but new technologies need PMF to gain distribution. We're not trying to sell people on ideology or ethics. I do want folks to know how the technology works, however, so I will post threads like the one linked here.

39896880• 2 years ago

I’m not a Bluesky user, but I contend that it is time to rethink success when it comes to the web. The website I am most active on has fewer than 50k active users, is limited to about that many intentionally, runs on donations and is centered are a single set of interests. It’s almost 10 years old.

mplewis• 2 years ago

How many DAU do you think Hacker News has?

jrflowers• 2 years ago

a very small percentage of social media users will switch

This is a good point. All of the existing social media users are entrenched in the big 3 of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and that is why TikTok does not exist

Maxamillion96• 2 years ago

That’s because bluesky is built for engineers not consumers, which explains why it’s so popular on here.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Why are we still watching bluesky build features slowly in public? Every time they post something it's like, ok, a familiar topic/discussion from 15 years ago, being thought out on some also-ran network no one will really care about without actual mass adoption, a possibility that continues to feel like is years out.

Mastodon was around for years with no attn and only got handed this miraculous situation and mass migration opportunity but it just got lucky basically. And it's not even it. Despite a bunch of Brazilians or whatever headed to bluesky briefly, it still isn't happening for it anytime soon.

consumer45111• 2 years ago

Why are we still watching bluesky build features slowly in public? Every time they post something it's like, ok, a familiar topic/discussion from 15 years ago, being thought out on some also-ran network no one will really care about without actual mass adoption, a possibility that continues to feel like is years out.

"They" did not post this, I did. I am pretty sure that "they" hate me because I was out way of line in their GitHub issues after a few beers, more than once. (I wish I could fix this)

Mastodon was around for years with no attn and only got handed this miraculous situation and mass migration opportunity but it just got lucky basically. And it's not even it. Despite a bunch of Brazilians or whatever headed to bluesky briefly, it still isn't happening for it anytime soon.

Why people should care is because this is a group of the smartest people around, who really give af about our future, and have not yet been spoiled by the inevitable mind effes that occur when you have to write an eight-figure tax check. These people saw it happen many times before, and created a protocol that prevented themselves from turning into the people whom we all tend to despise on Internet forums.

They have also created a user experience which according to many comments, "feels like old school Twitter." All that, while on an extremely well thought out federated protocol. This is a huge accomplishment.

pfraze4• 2 years ago

Heh, what's your github username? I'm sure there's no harm done.

LeoPanthera2• 2 years ago

I was also skeptical, but all the furries have gone to BlueSky, and furries are the indicator species of the internet. They only thrive in healthy ecosystems. So I wouldn't bet against it just yet.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

Furries claim to be going to Bluesky every month, then they come back to Twitter because that’s where everyone else is.

It took forever for Bluesky to add video support as well which held it back for ages.

jszymborski• 2 years ago

I've ditched X for Mastodon (and BlueSky via it's AP bridge) for some time now. I've formed community and get way more engagement on Mastodon than I ever got on Xwitter.

You can say Mastodon or bsky will never happen, but for many it already has.

timeon• 2 years ago

You can say Mastodon or bsky will never happen, but for many it already has.

This will sound elitists but I prefer it that way. Like Instagram before Android (not because of Android but amount of users).

albrewer• 2 years ago

I jumped to Lemmy since my favorite Reddit client switched straight to it after the API fiasco. Seems suitable and I like the small community.

richardw• 2 years ago

My guess: because many want an alternative to X and hope one of them will reach escape velocity/good enough UX etc. This is firmly a chicken and egg situation but as long as there’s progress and growth, there is still a chance.

LeoPanthera2• 2 years ago

I guess that explains why that page won't load, I guess the user is down.

consumer45111• 2 years ago

OK, so this is an interesting thing. If I understand Paul (Bsky) correctly, one of the major reasons that they didn't adopt AP was that it could not scale well.

As in, if Mastodon got say 2 million new users in a few days, then each instance would have to sync the entire DB. Most instances could not handle that. In AT's case, that is handled more efficiently. That is correct, isn't isn't it?

ocdtrekkie3• 2 years ago

Not really, no. A Mastodon server mostly only sees posts from users being followed by someone on their server, or mentioning someone on their server. Every post definitely does not get shipped to every server.

However, there's definitely some wild inefficiencies in federation: If thousands of servers do follow a given user, and that user posts a video file, all of those thousands of servers will download and store a copy.

The fediverse is largely analogous to email in that posts are addressed to destinations. Servers have inboxes and store what's sent to them.

gyudin• 2 years ago

Yup, facepalm

jes5199• 2 years ago

it’s weird tho, none of my feed is actually hosted at my domain. I forget what I had to do to claim my url on bluesky but I understood it as proving that I controlled the domain, not actually using it to point to content. Does any part of reading the bluesky feed actually make DNS requests??

mozzius• 2 years ago

yeah, there’s a little bit of indirection in that domain handles are separate from the actual data hosting. domain handles resolve to a DID, and the DID document points to where your data host is (allowing you to change both your handle and your data host seamlessly). you can then host your own Personal Data Server if you want to

If you're curious why every username is a domain, it's because users are sites

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