Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky

by ianrahman • 2 years ago

269 526 2 years ago

My experience is that fundamentally there's nothing better with Bluesky or Mastodon when compared to Twitter. They're all toxic doom scrolling applications and if one does use them, it will be a good idea to control your usage as if it was cocaine.

daghamm• 2 years ago

Yes, but hopefully it is more free speech than om twitter where Elon wants to decide what you can and can't see.

It is well known that he is obsessed that things that align with his own views get more visibility while things he doesn't like is suppressed

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...

fastball3• 2 years ago

And that doesn't apply to the powers that be at other social networks (or management at Twitter pre-Elon)?

jl6• 2 years ago

“These sites are all as bad as each other” remains a very workable hypothesis.

4bpp• 2 years ago

Before the other side took hold of a major platform and started doing it to their ends, "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach", "you don't have the right to a megaphone" etc. were maxims that were regularly fielded by pundits in defense of shadowbanning and any thumbprints being discovered on the algorithmic scale (though they were never so confident in it as to make the manipulation explicit upfront before it was revealed).

The "my free speech is being taken away; they are just being moderated for the common good" conjugation is something that is in fact shared between both camps. The only stable solution going forward may in fact be the pillarisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation) that we are already seeing emerge, which will leave both sides in a state of perpetual discontent about having no means to force their message upon unwilling recipients on the other but at least let the like-minded interact with each other consensually.

spinach• 2 years ago

It's interesting how this conversation about free speech on twitter really only came up after Elon Musk took over, even though it was terrible before Musk. If you had opinions on certain spicy topics that went against the American Democrat left you would be suspended until you removed the post or banned. There was even the "Twitter Files" which documented some of this.

It actually seems more open to me now, only that people who got used to being able to ban people they didn't like so they left. Yes, Musk does things are suspicious, but overall I've found the experience better, as someone who holds moderate views.

prisenco9• 2 years ago

Right now Bluesky's feed is time-based (although there is a suggestions tab). This will change as advertiser needs take over, but at least for the time being it's a noticeable difference.

Tarsul2• 2 years ago

I stil don't understand why none of these sites counts downvotes for their algorithm. Look at HN which does; the best comments are at the top which means that the user sees the more interesting posts first. And troll posts would never rise to the top. There's a lot of tinkering that could provide which is the best up/downvotes-algorithm but imo it simply does not work without downvoting. E.g. Tiktok allows a lot of options to downrank things that you do not like, meaning the user who curates his own feed gets a stream of posts that are more aligned with what he wants than anywhere else. And that's why TikTok won.

luma• 2 years ago

Social media orgs discovered a while back that what they want is "engagement", not "good content". Enraging content is as good as "good" content in terms of clicks, and downvotes would bury that enraging content.

Making you mad is as good as making you feel any other thing in terms of engagement.

biddit• 2 years ago

To my understanding, removing downvoting removes a vector of abuse. ie: "downvote brigades" on Reddit

While Twitter doesn't have downvoting, it is still dealing with "report brigades" - various interest groups will organize via Telegram (or similar) to mass-report tweets they don't like.

I wonder if you could strike a balance by incorporating downvotes as a visual metric, but not using it to rank content, thus allowing the expression of dislike while removing the abuse vector.

saagarjha• 2 years ago

Troll posts definitely rise to the top on Hacker News. That's why there are multiple buttons to bring them down.

mogoh• 2 years ago

Fediverse does not have to be doom scrolling if you just follow accounts around your hobbies and interests and filter certain keywords.

thrance3• 2 years ago

I use none of these, and generally agree that the world would be a better place if we could magically get rid of all social media.

But Twitter is filled with much, much more hate and disinformation than its alternatives. I'd say it is definitely worse than the others.

oneeyedpigeon11• 2 years ago

Serious question: would you include HN under the umbrella of 'social media'? If not, why not, where is the line?

chickenfeed3• 2 years ago

If we could cut people's tongues out the world would be a better place.

I don't know, I think communication can provide a fertile ground for good exchanges as well as bad. It's just somewhat stifled in the current forms.

throw10920• 2 years ago

But Twitter is filled with much, much more hate and disinformation than its alternatives.

What's your source on that? And who defines "hate" or "disinformation"?

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

I think Mastodons API-centric approach has lead to user-friendly results that feel fundamentally different. Mastodon gives me an in-order timeline of just the accounts I follow. I configured it to hide images by default, reduce animations, and to require user action to load more posts (no infinite scroll). It feels so much more tuned to my well-being versus apps that are tuned to maximize adverisement views by trapping you in doom scrolling.

schism15• 2 years ago

"The toxicity is coming from inside the house!"

I agree. These platforms are best when the communities are smaller. The main tipping point will be when it becomes perceived (just perceived, even) as a viable option for advertising/monetization.

The only real option is to just keep pushing to the next frontier...

neuroelectron2• 2 years ago

I've organically come across more mastadon instances than bluesky. But that's just me. I wish it was easier to surf mastadon though, where you have to log in to see content unlike bluesky.

8organicbits2• 2 years ago

You don't need to be logged in to see content on Mastodon. There are privacy settings that could hide content from non-followers, and mastodon users may be more privacy conscious, but log in is not generally required.

neuroelectron2• 2 years ago

Must just be in the app then. Brave is supposed to block opening links in apps in iOS but it's broken lately.

keiferski2• 2 years ago

A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself.

Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating valuable content on TikTok/Instagram/Bluesky/X/wherever, make sure you’re publishing it from a specific brandable name - and not generically posting good identity-less content. It doesn’t need to be your real name, as there are plenty of successful pseudonymous individuals out there. It just needs to be reasonably memorable and consistent.

JKCalhoun4• 2 years ago

The blog post (and your comment) presumes someone is a celebrity, has a kingdom.

A lot of us are just busking on the street corners.

keiferski2• 2 years ago

Not necessarily. I think it’s perfectly possible to be a random non-famous person that builds a following because they have insightful tweets/images/content. But the risk is that if you don’t give yourself a reasonably memorable publisher name, you won’t be able to transfer that audience to another platform, because no one is going to see your name and recognize it from elsewhere.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

their fans follow them on that platform

A percentage of their fans, and it can be a small percent.

You see this phenomenon all the time on people leaving X to Bluesky they expect their audience to just follow them and the engagement to be comparable and when it just isn’t you see them either quietly come back or just cross post and pretend they’re not back.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 years ago

Network effects are real huh? Geez, who knew?

kurayashi• 2 years ago

I‘m not sure if this actually works. In 2019 the live streaming platform mixer tried this and payed several of the biggest streamers a lot of money for exclusive contracts. The userbase didn’t follow and the service was shut down a year later.

glenstein17• 2 years ago

I don't think that was a specific repudiation of that model in particular, I think there's a bit more of a fundamental strategic misunderstanding from the people trying to make Mixer into a thing.

To the extent that bringing big streamers onto the platform had an impact, it was a positive one I would say. But even with them there was too much inertia.

prisenco9• 2 years ago

When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers).

Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go through with it. Investors will encourage Bluesky to kick that can down the road until people forgot they ever promised it in the first place.

That said, we will have a good amount of time with Bluesky as a more positive site before these changes kick in. But my hunch is that it'll be shorter than previous cycles. The rate of profit has fallen and investors don't have as much grace for companies that grow without revenue as they did 10-15 years ago.

Of all the sites that emerged out of the internet renaissance starting in the late 90's, it seems the only one that has hung on and still provides a good value, despite all it's issues, is Wikipedia. And that has to be because it's a non-profit powered by volunteer labor with no need to optimize revenue or make a profit.

I often dream of recreating the classic web using a very low cost subscription model (since cheap is better than free, because free is never truly free) and apps that are bootstrapped or crowdfunded instead of vc funded. Decentralization in that circumstance is much more achievable and way less of a threat, although it still comes with a ton of technical and political considerations.

brightball• 2 years ago

IMO Mastodon is the only real place for a truly decentralized option.

BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now. It has a future, but the branding in very tainted.

ChocolateGod5• 2 years ago

If you think BlueSky is political, Mastodon is worse.

Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them (rather than just delisting in the public feed) and on can ban you and stop you moving your data to another instance.

On Mastodon, admins can also be pressured into banning users by other admins under fear of having their instances blocked, and admins are usually political activists.

I've avoided BlueSky because people are allowed to boast and defend being attracted to kids or spam death threats (including addresses attached), but not have differing political opinions, even when they're arguably mainstream.

igravious3• 2 years ago

The whole https://chrisholdgraf.com/blog/2024/bluesky#why-not-use-mast... section is very unconvincing

??? i'm not using it because no one else is using it

If social media is about having interesting, dynamic interactions with people, then you need to go to the place that maximizes the chance of this happening

if that was the case people would stay with Twitter/X

For example, one of its core features - federated servers and identity - is actually a pretty confusing UX pattern for the vast majority of people that don’t care about that kind of thing (“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”).

how on earth is this confusing to anyone? it's a different model

Moreover, while having federated servers means that communities have more control over their norms and rules, it also means communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server. These are features if you think of a social networks as a tightly-interconnected and self-contained community, but the appeal of these kinds of platforms is having global reach to people that you may otherwise never have met.

people forget in real life that we aren't all in the same social network and there are different protocols for different meat-space social networks and we internalise and navigate them all the time – in fact there are genres of literature out there (comedy of manners) that exploit social misunderstandings

dartos5• 2 years ago

“Political” and “decentralized” Are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political, as the only ones that care about decentralization are the ones who care about politics.

Everyone else is just trying to see what the famous person said last week or what their friend did on vacation.

Corpo social media does solve for that.

vidarh5• 2 years ago

I agree with the sentiment, but I'd say specifically the Fediverse is the only real place for a truly decentralised option.

It doesn't need to be Mastodon. You don't need to be on Mastodon to interact with the Fediverse or be part of it, and that is the key strength. Mastodon can be corrupted and the Fediverse is still there.

That could include Bluesky over time - you can follow my Mastodon from Bluesky via a bridge [1] - any desirable parts of their protocol, will be copied or emulated or bolted on the side for other Fediverse projects.

[1] https://brid.gy/

Gigachad3• 2 years ago

Have you used Bluesky? I’ve been on it since it was invite only and I don’t see any politics on my feed. It’s basically just posts from friends, friends of friends, and artists for me.

Bluesky seems the least pushy with rage bait content of all the social media’s.

grumbel2• 2 years ago

Mastodon isn't true decentralization to begin with, it's just federation like email, where every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none. I find that approach a waste of time, as it's just replicating past mistakes verbatim.

On top of that, the whole Fediverse is extremely political. Email providers don't care much what you write or with whom you communicate outside of spam, so it works quite well. Meanwhile Fediverse is blocking people and servers left and right, it's completely unusable unless you follow the group-think on whatever server you are on.

Real decentralization is what Nostr is doing, where serves are just dumb relays, user-ids are public-key pairs and all the intelligence is in the client. BlueSky's AT-protocol should be capable of similar stuff, though in practice is still very much focused around the main BlueSky server.

BlueTemplar• 2 years ago

Isn't Truth Social a fork of Mastodon (that might or might not be compatible any more).

Or am I confusing with Gab ?

toss1• 2 years ago

And that 'truly decentralized option' comes with a problem that will permanently dissuade many serious people from using it — there is no way to prevent imposter accounts.

Imposter accounts will be attempted for anyone of significant standing or authority posting anything authoritative (e.g., product or policy announcements) controversial or notable, and with no way to shut them down and maintain an authoritative presence of you, no one of note will even go there, or stay once they encounter the problem. Easier to stay somewhere else like Bluesky or Spoutible where they at least attempt moderation and authentication and declare "Any Mastodon accts purporting to be me are fake.".

I've personally spoken to authors/speakers/officials who checked it out after Twitter was sold to Musk, and once they understood the no-authentication-in-principle problem, said "NFW".

rebeccaskinner2• 2 years ago

BlueSky became immediately political in its narrative and many people just view it in the same light as Truth Social now.

I don't see this at all. Quite the opposite in fact.

From what I've seen, BlueSky is trying very hard as a company to stay apolitical in an extremely naive way that's going to ultimately drive away users. There's simply no way to to be apolitical as a general social media platform today when social media is so widely used for discussing politics and current events, is a key target for propaganda campaigns, and in a highly fractured political climate.

BlueSky gained momentum primarily from people who were driven away from X as it started to move further right, with a lot of engagement driven by left and center-left leaning people, along with people who might not have been directly engaged in politics except for being the target of right-leaning hate campaigns (LGBT people in particular).

If they'd doubled down on that, I think they'd be a lot more successful in the long run. Sites like Truth Social, Parler, and X have demonstrated that there's a significant market for politically aligned social media spaces for the right, and both the significant activity in left and center-left spaces in Twitter before the buy-out, and the growth in Bluesky point to there being a significant market for an unapologeticly left leaning social media site as well (I'd point to Tumblr here as another example, although I don't use it and only have a passing idea that it seems to be a predominantly left leaning space).

Instead of embracing product market fit with an underserved market though, BlueSky seems to be both-sides-ing themselves into a situation where they're likely going to see an exodus. By inviting and protecting right-wing provocateurs on the platform they are driving away their core audience in order to attract people who already have their choice of established competitors (X). The only value they can add over sites like X and Truth Social is a group of users ready to be the target of trolling and bullying, but having recent experience with migrating away from Twitter I don't see them sticking around BlueSky for long in that environment.

In the end, the attempt at being apolitical will doom BlueSky to being a worse less populated X or Truth Social, rather than making the most of the opportunity to be a more decidedly left-leaning social media platform for an audience that prefers to avoid a strong right-wing presence in their social media experience.

dingnuts4• 2 years ago

can't someone just stand up another atproto AppView with different default feeds to solve this problem?

BlueSky's moderation team has traditional Twitter-like biases but my understanding of the AT protocol, from reading the spec, is that they do not have a monopoly on moderation in the AT network.

igravious3• 2 years ago

I dream of a “classic web” as well.

Principles:

(a) non minification and no binary code – this is so that the platform is user and dev centred and not corpo and advertiser centred

(b) static only mode as default, as in a site will be considered broken if it needs dynamic scripts to work, or at least it won't be considered a "classic" site – this is for (1) accessability and (2) command line (non-GUI) browser access and (3) easier automation – push as much common dynamic stuff into CSS as possible

(c) cookies are in plain text and by default can only store essential information, cookies must be versioned and have a corresponding description file on the site's server – no information can be stored on the user's computer that is opaque to the user

(d) instant messaging is to be a standard of the “classic” web – it must be federated and decentralised, just like the web is – it is not a separate information space, it is part of the same information space as the “classic” web

that's off the top of my head – i view the web and instant messaging (or microblogging or whatever you want to call it) as fundamentally broken and user hostile

prisenco9• 2 years ago

Those are all great and I'd love to see them too.

But along the lines of general user experience, the central feature I have in mind is the time-based feed. No engagement algorithms, no suggestions, just things happening as they happen. Anything that goes viral does so organically with no push from the system.

The irony of all social media is they all start with an ad-free time-based feed to make people fall in love with the app, then once they reach a critical mass they switch to an engagement algorithm to addict them and pump up views for advertisers.

drdaeman• 2 years ago

non minification and no binary code

I believe you want human comprehensibility, but going with "no minification, no binary" may throw out a baby with the bathwater. Everything about computers is binary code underneath, even this message (and even UTF-8 is not exactly a trivial spec - it's just that we have tools that make it super accessible). I suspect you rather want lack of deliberate obfuscation for the sake of obscurity.

I think binary formats are fine, as long as there are tools to work with them. Same with minified code if the source maps are right there - we already spend a ton of computing resources for our convenience, no reason to send more bytes over the wire if they're not needed, just make sure they're fully accessible to whoever wants to look under the hood.

ghaff4• 2 years ago

Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience. There's just so much fragmentation or migration away generally that none of it is very interesting. I think a lot of people took the Musk Twitter takeover as an excuse to re-evaluate their whole relationship to that sort of platform which basically led to a death spiral.

BeetleB7• 2 years ago

Bluesky, Mastodon, and what's left of Twitter/X are all pretty much dead in my experience.

Define "alive" and "dead".

As a Mastodon user, it certainly is very much alive to me. I follow a lot of well known people, and that number isn't dropping.

This reminds of almost every Emacs thread here. People claiming it's dead/dying because of VSCode, whereas if you're active in the Emacs community, all you can see is growth.

Mastodon is going to hit a peak - it may already have. But as long as it maintains a healthy number of users, it will always be alive. At the moment it's more resilient than Bluesky, where almost all the users are on one instance.

glzone1• 2 years ago

I feel like twitter / x being called dead has happened a lot since Elon's purchase (they fired folks which lead to claims to was going to be going down etc etc).

Is this really the case now that it's dead (for real)? Are folks going back to NBC/MSNBC etc for news?

amatecha10• 2 years ago

Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other.

Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation.

I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).

wmf4• 2 years ago

How has Bluesky degraded?

prisenco9• 2 years ago

Bluesky has not yet degraded.

But the funding model it chose has proven to degrade the user experience of every other service.

Karrot_Kream7• 2 years ago

I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. What actual things are you worried about or unhappy regarding with Bluesky? It's not perfect, and if you have problems with its decentralization posture, Christine Lemmer-Webber has a fantastic post [1] detailing her problems with the protocol. Bluesky has the AT Protocol underneath it and has infrastructural components that can allow other entities to run Bluesky.

So my problem with this post, and general griping like this, is that by leaning so heavily on a shared boogeyman (that of "enshittification" or whatever) that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger. Solutions can only come when we discuss problems.

At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take, and I realize venting to the in-group can be therapeutic.

[1] https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

neilv• 2 years ago

I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance.

IMO, there was plenty of substance, on things a lot of HNers either don't realize, or disregard.

that there stops being concrete actionable complaints and more just general anger.

Good point in general (and ironic, since that too is a tired, pervasive condition that somehow still needs pointing out, even if it seems like you're just complaining ineffectually in doing so).

But, since the Bluesky concerns apparently needed to be said, to inform people who appear not to understand, then saying it isn't just complaining.

At times a cynical portion of me even thinks this sort of posting is just low-key karma farming too, but I know that's too uncharitable a take,

If want to verbalize uncharitable takes on HN, be careful what you start. Your own comment could've been bog-standard damage control astroturfing.

prisenco9• 2 years ago

| What actual things are you worried about or unhappy

That it is following the same funding model that resulted in the problems we've seen. Bluesky currently doesn't generate any significant revenue. At some point they will have to in order to satisfy investors. If they were concerned about preventing the problems previous social media sites experienced, they would have sought out a different funding model.

| if you have problems with its decentralization posture

I don't. I was working on federated social networking protocols back in 2008. I'm fully aware of the concerns and I know it's not a panacea. Centralization has strong benefits for user safety and experience.

| there stops being concrete actionable complaints

My other comments expand on the biggest issue which is the advertiser-optimized engagement algorithm. A site which does not cater to advertising (using an alternative source of income such as a user-driven subscription model) can instead maintain a time-based feed. This is a much better user experience. It doesn't favor negative engagement, it's less addicting, and it doesn't create artificial virality.

tqwhite9• 2 years ago

I’m with you. Every same conversation is about judgment and self-aggrandizement rarely about discussing problems, finding solutions or appreciating opportunities.

Bluesky is fine. It’s not perfect. It’s struggling to deal with demands for viewpoint moderation. It’s a public benefit corp so venture capitalists have less to complain about. It has good tools to deal with most things. The people who are working on it seem competent and sincere.

I like the phrase, karma farming.

andreilys• 2 years ago

I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia.

Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

dheerajvs• 2 years ago

Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

And what did they get trained on in the first place?

Azerty9999• 2 years ago

Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.

LLMs hallucinate/confabulate. I use Wikipedia to check source info and to find additional information. Of course there are more reliable sources than Wikipedia, but it's useful, still.

eviks• 2 years ago

You favorite tool can easily answer that question

Yizahi2• 2 years ago

I sometimes use neural nets for obscure compound questions (with a so so efficiency), but I can't imagine using NN in place of Wikipedia. I go to Wikipedia to find factual information (by factual I don't mean guaranteed, I mean hard data - years, names, models etc.). How can anyone rely on a random text generator to get factual data?

CartyBoston• 2 years ago

Twitter sucks because it's commercial. Threads sucks because it's commercial. Bluesky will suck because it's commercial.

If only there was a pattern we could detect.

Learn about the Fediverse (not just "Mastodon"), it's the only solution worthy of you.

JKCalhoun4• 2 years ago

I wonder if a tree blogs in an obscure, infrequently traveled forest will anyone read it?

caseyy• 2 years ago

If only there was a pattern we could detect

https://briefs.video/videos/i-am-leaving/

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

IDK how this applies to Bluesky. The underlying infrastructure is only loosely tethered to Bluesky the company. If you want to pull all your shit and run it separate from the bluesky stuff you can and there's really nothing they can do to try and stop you or ban you.

They can limit your reach on their stuff but if you don't want to use their stuff it doesn't actually matter and you can continue to exist completely independent of them if you want.

CaptainFever• 2 years ago

HackerNews is commercial. Beware of sampling bias.

loeg2• 2 years ago

Threads sucks because it's empty. Bluesky appears to be an extremely online leftist enclave (which might be valuable to extemely online lefists, but is less appealing to the rest of us). Twitter... remains the king? It has its issues but lack of poasters and a broad spectrum of opinions aren't among them. These services aren't bad because they're commercial enterprises.

asadotzler3• 2 years ago

The broad set of perspectives is "H-1B visas are great because it lets us exploit workers" vs "H-1B visas are terrible because I'm a racist." Read trending tweets and you'll see no different.

Some diversity they got there.

TheAceOfHearts• 2 years ago

Threads is full of major brands spamming corporate slop. Since it's still in the honeymoon phase it doesn't have ads, but you can tell that once it's big and mature enough they're gonna follow the Instagram strategy of filling it to the brim with ads.

pipeline_peak• 2 years ago

The only thing missing are users willing to go out of their way to learn how to spin up fediverse instances and perform volunteer system administration in their free time. The type of work that otherwise would be paid to employees by said commercial entities.

Piece of cake

soneca3• 2 years ago

I understand a blog on your own domain is your land in regard to microblogging platforms. But what would be my land in regard to community software, like Telegram or Discord?

Is there any software like this that I can host on my domain?

crimsoneer2• 2 years ago

Matrix/Discourse? But like all self hosted solution, it's harder to use than a managed product. I think they're both excellent though, and pretty common in some circles.

JKCalhoun4• 2 years ago

But will anyone come?

Plenty of the people I follow, Jeff Geerling for example (hi!) have their own sites/kingdoms but I don't make the rounds of their personal sites every morning.

soneca3• 2 years ago

Actually, it doesn’t have to be self-hosted for me.

A managed product, hosted by a company, that I can point to my domain would work (just like some blog or website makers solutions).

Discourse has managed option though, so thanks for pointing it out.

9982443532• 2 years ago

My team uses Matrix and I must say I'm not satisfied. There are messages that I get a notification for every time I open the app, and "mark as read" buttons that do nothing, especially if you use threads. This is something that has supposedly been fixed many times, but it's one of these persistent issues that keep coming back.

Also, as far as I can tell, there is no real diversity in clients even though Matrix is in principle an open protocol. Everything is either Element or a fork of it, or at least is built on matrix-react-sdk, which makes them all effectively the same.

entrepy1232• 2 years ago

Hosted Matrix can be a good sweet spot: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/

crimsoneer2• 2 years ago

This seems like a rather poor excuse to not try and integrate with the Fediverse/mastodon. Yes, managing your own space is more complicated than using a manager solution, but like, isn't that always going to be the case?

gtirloni• 2 years ago

Yes, especially when the author says they care about control.

verdverm• 2 years ago

For someone technical, this is certainly an option, but the other half of the argument is that you need to be where the other people are. In this respect, Mastondon is not something the average social media user finds easy, and why Bluesky is having success with this group.

dsr_3• 2 years ago

“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”

Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.

oneeyedpigeon11• 2 years ago

Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.

igravious3• 2 years ago

they may be confused by it yet it is not a hard concept

BodyCulture2• 2 years ago

What is the evidence for people being confused about that? Did any scientist some research about this, are there any facts or studies about this issue? Or does just someone think it is an issue?

dsr_3• 2 years ago

Stages of enlightenment:

1. That didn't work as I expected.

2. I am confused!

3. Oh, that's how it works! I learned something.

Humans go through this every day, in domains technological and not.

HL33tibCe7• 2 years ago

You can say it’s “not a hard concept” as much as you’d like, it doesn’t change the reality that it is confusing and hard to understand for end users used to Twitter (which is everyone)

jeroenhd2• 2 years ago

You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account. And even more people have no idea what the @gmail.com/@ibm.com is about. All they know is that some of their emails don't reach their contacts, probably because "the computer broke again".

It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.

Plus, federation makes validating accounts real hard. Looking for a semi-popular Twitter user on Mastodon will bring forth 800 Twitter-to-Mastodon-bridges with plausible-looking domains, only for the real user to end up using something like "hachyderm" as their domain name. I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

I have my own domain, and have email set up so that any email to that domain goes to me.

You'd be surprised (well, nobody here on HN would be) to know how many times I tell a business that my email is "their-business@my-domain.com", and they ask me how I got that email address, whether I work for their company, etc.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 years ago

You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account.

Since I like surprises, do tell ... how many people think that?

notyourwork2• 2 years ago

It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.

It's not hard to someone with exposure to a certain medium. Though its a bit dismissive like it would be for a mechanic to question why a person doesn't know know about rotors, spark plugs and other "simple" car concepts.

Zambyte5• 2 years ago

I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.

Abandoning the concept of celebreties and instead using social media for social interactions with people who you can "validate" their identity by walking over to them and asking them for their ID.

dghughes• 2 years ago

You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account.

I get a pile of junk from people who assume they can do that. I guess I have a lot of stupid distant relatives. It was the same for Hotmail too I got so many hotel receipts, or resume replies etc. one went on for decade or more. Yes you can reply back "no this is wrong" but nobody listens.

jrmg• 2 years ago

I think people underestimate just how much “weird techiness” having two ‘@‘ signs creates. It’s (whether it ‘should’ be or not) immediately unapproachable.

nkrisc2• 2 years ago

Ask any random person on the street to identify the domain in a URL or email address and what it means.

Aurornis• 2 years ago

This line of thinking is what makes the website user-hostile.

I completely understood the function of the usernames from the start, but to this day I still sigh whenever I encounter a new Mastodon user on a different network because I have to do a song and dance to get them followed on my main account. The whole thing is cognitive overhead I do not want.

riffraff• 2 years ago

But this is the same for blue sky, it's just that there's no other bluesky "instance"

BeetleB7• 2 years ago

This was the weakest point of the whole article, particularly because Mastodon and Bluesky are identical in this respect. The reason he doesn't realize it is that almost everyone is on the same instance.

So yes, you will have:

@stephenking.bsky.social

and

@stephenking.bsky.otherinstance

Unless Bluesky remains a single server, in which case it's not at all decentralized.

oneeyedpigeon11• 2 years ago

You've highlighted the exact reason this is a problem for mastodon and not for bluesky: on the latter, there's a default, so people who don't realise why it matters don't need to worry about it.

For the record, there are other differences - on Bluesky, you use your non-default domain to login in exactly the same place, there aren't 'weird gaps' between different domains.

paride5745• 2 years ago

It’s already exactly the same problem.

@zuck.bsky.app

and

@zuck.meta.com

are two different accounts.

The only “problem” bsky solves is choosing a server. But if ATProto becomes widely used, the problem will appear as in Mastodon today. The only way to avoid it is for bsky to never become really decentralised. So yet another VC-backed social media company.

Zambyte5• 2 years ago

Small nitpick, the domain name used for a ATProto identity is decoupled from the server that hosts that users data. A username is established on ATProto by creating a TXT record of the users DID (essentially a public key). This is not identical to ActivityPub, because the users data is hosted / managed by the server that the A/AAAA record points to. ATProto users can migrate their data from server to server while maintaining the same username. ActivityPub users cannot.

Also, Bluesky is a centralized view of the data in the decentralized ATProto network. This means you will never end up having the problem where searching for a user on one instance will not show up because they are on another instance that they have not federated with. There are obviously tradeoffs with this, but IMO they do seem sensible. The nice thing about Bluesky is not that it is decentralized (it's not), it's that the data that it let's users interface with is decentralized, and if something goes south with Bluesky, another application can be built on the same data and users can migrate without starting from square one.

ggm3• 2 years ago

Wait until you find out the tuple to identify you logging in on Amazon is {user@host.dom, password} or used to be: I had two distinct accounts using the same email address. Confusing!

glenstein17• 2 years ago

I'm noticing here that people are giving it the college try of insisting that email domains are "too confusing". I think the further down this rabbit hole we go, the more equivocal one has to be about how large percentage of the population that actually is.

I work at a company that relies on engagement with customers over email I'm sure plenty of other people here do as well, and whatever people's confusion with email, somehow they figure it out when they need to and the world seems to keep turning.

At some point this conversation is no longer about the specifics of Mastodon or BlueSky, it's just general information literacy and functional literacy.

Hilariously, arguments of the form "what if people do it wrong" like this were made even for the introduction of calculators. I think it's better understood as an ordinary rite of passage than the specific identification of a genuine problem.

austin-cheney3• 2 years ago

Don’t build castles in other peoples kingdoms

That is why I devote my energy to enriching my home file server with custom software that I can access anywhere via domain name mapped to a IPv6 address. It is my kingdom and its not going away. I can demo on there full stack applications that would be challenging to demo otherwise. If I had a blog on there I could say what I want. I could host a personal email address on there. I am exploring how to limit access by physical device identity so that it remains private even on the public internet.

that_guy_iain2• 2 years ago

I'm not trying to be rude but are you serious or being sarcastic? Because on here it could go either way. There are definitely people who would build everything themselves just because they can. And there are people who would mock someone for doing so.

If you're being serious, how much time does it take and how much custom software do you actually have?

chickenfeed3• 2 years ago

Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.

austin-cheney3• 2 years ago

I wrote a Node application that serves as a real time dashboard of my docker containers, web servers, port availability, provides a command terminal in the browser, and a system logger. I should also write a symlink manager and a process manager for it. The web servers are executed from this application and allow any kind of traffic redirection via streamed pipes. Then in the docker containers I can run things like pihole, jellyfin, and various other things that I can choose to expose outside the lan via traffic redirection rules on the web servers. Running multiple web servers on the same box allows access via port numbers and different management rules per server.

that_guy_iain2• 2 years ago

It's quite interesting how much Musk's taking over Twitter damaged a lot of small businesses, where the person's personal brand on Twitter actually generated a decent amount of their business. What was even more interesting was seeing those semi-large accounts 20-100k followers move over to Bluesky post the same material on both but get more engagement on Bluesky with 1/10th of the audience.

afro88• 2 years ago

Very interesting. Do you have any links with actual data / detail?

asadotzler3• 2 years ago

Not op but I'm on Bluesky and have seen several of these decent sized accounts, including people at large newsrooms say they get far more engagement at BlueSky than Twitter. Bigger fish, smaller pond, I suspect, but also more engaged users perhaps.

edavis3• 2 years ago

this post by the team has some: https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-29-2024-engagement

chickenfeed3• 2 years ago

Bluesky has potential with the AT protocol.

I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down.

The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens.

Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point.

Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability.

Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership.

My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.

maelito3• 2 years ago

This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot.

I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky.

The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views...

The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2).

Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers.

1. The website is https://politix.top. Feel free to fork it for your own country. 2. Here is the Bluesky script https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.t...

oneeyedpigeon11• 2 years ago

a significant difference from what X ever permitted

I'm glad you specified "X" there; Twitter, of course, used to have a very good API. The bar has undoubtedly lowered.

maelito3• 2 years ago

My memory fails, despite the fact that in 2012 I used the Twitter API, but I don't think it was this easy and open for Twitter before X, was it ?

glimshe• 2 years ago

"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

maelito3• 2 years ago

there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service.

But the API access and federation should remain free.

aSanchezStern• 2 years ago

You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.

splintercell• 2 years ago

The feature you're describing is only supported by BlueSky "for now". It isn't an essential element of the design of BS.

capl• 2 years ago

Biggest issue is the lack of free speech. It’s a platform with an agenda, which is a huge red flag.

GlacierFox2• 2 years ago

That's my biggest issue with it. I didn't even have twitter to begin with, but after trying out Bluesky I've barely had the patience to use it. Most people on there seem to be ultra-left wing virtue signalling phychopaths. It's obnoxiously progressive with no space for nuanced thought.

louthy2• 2 years ago

So, to be clear, the GP was stating that their issue is a lack of free speech. You agree that that’s your biggest issue with Bluesky too.

But you’re unhappy with people expressing their personal opinions, primarily because you don’t agree with them?

What version of free-speech is it that you want? I assume it’s just like all ‘free speech absolutioniats’: free speech as long as it’s your own or from people you agree with.

ggm3• 2 years ago

For you.

dom966• 2 years ago

Compared to what? X? The platform that doesn't even allow "cisgender" to be posted without a post getting demoted?

Zak3• 2 years ago

“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”

While the author has a valid point about Bluesky having more momentum and some UX advantages over Mastodon, this is silly. Most people already know that choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@hotmail.com might be different people.

Klonoar2• 2 years ago

Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing in phishing attempts often enough that I can see the confusing complaint having some merit.

Zak3• 2 years ago

It's a bit different when someone is being intentionally deceptive. None of the major social platforms or protocols guard effectively against someone making a deceptively similar username to impersonate someone.

I bet the vast majority of non-technical people who use email would correctly answer that the two email addresses might belong to different people if asked. That doesn't mean they'll be checking closely while using email every time.

Something similar is possible on Bluesky since usernames are domain names.

glenstein17• 2 years ago

Technical folks might. Non-technical folks fall for this kind of thing

Right, but at that point we're just talking about general functional literacy. These same people are going to have trouble logging into their bank from a different computer, or ordering from a Wendy's menu or getting an oil change. Most people don't, and they sign up and post their memes, and follow their people, the platform reaches is critical mass and the world keeps on turning.

ritcgab• 2 years ago

People with similar mindsets gather on the same platform and ultimately create an echo chamber. If that's what you want, you can do the same on X/Twitter by creating your own "network". Just don't use the recommendation system and that's it.

Abolishing a platform is merely a form of performance art.

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

don’t build your castle in a kingdom that somebody else controls
I’ll encourage folks to drive those conversations to community-specific spaces (like Discourse, Discord, etc).

Who does the author think controls Discord?

diggan2• 2 years ago

Who does the author think controls Discord?

I think you misunderstand what sort of control they speak about. I think what they're getting at is "Who is doing the moderation?" rather than "Who is maintaining the servers?", so the community aspect instead of the technical details.

I think Discord let people do the moderation part pretty much however they want, compared to say Twitter where there is one moderation team that controls it all.

Bit similar to Reddit I suppose, although Reddit also have admins/site-wide moderators that clean up across subreddits, so not identical.

Still, seems weird to drive people from one castle to another castle, when instead you can drive them to your own website (like with Discourse). But I don't think that's what the author is talking about.

exodust3• 2 years ago

The author lists a set of rules, one of which is: "always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom".

So he's motivated by "moving people to kingdoms", which sounds like the exact thing he's calling out the big social platforms on, but adopting himself on a smaller scale.

In the end, respecting users isn't the guiding force. "Kingdom building" is. Brand building. Users herded like cattle from castle to castle. It's "trust me bro" website ethics replacing corporate social media policies.

bl_valance• 2 years ago

This is the right attitude. The amount of people who's world crumbles when they get banned and heavily depend on its engagement and income is too high.

In terms of Bluesky/Threads, etc. When a platform's intrinsic value is that, "it's not the other platform", it won't last or will only track very niche and closed-off groups. What does Bluesky offer that is unique/different?

Federation, as the post mentioned, is something the average user doesn't care or is beyond their comprehension. Too much friction as it is implemented, the best way is to organically and transparently implement it, if it's even possible.

the__alchemist• 2 years ago

I'm worried about the issues in the article (They are likely an inevitable consequence of the funding model). For now, I'm loving it! I didn't have Twitter or X. I'm using it to follow various science and engineering feeds. It's fantastic, and the people are friendly; some of the highest quality discussion (but short) I've found online. (Not to HN's level though! )

To make Discover useful, I recommend aggressively muting or blocking bottomfeeder political content. If someone is only posting tribal or identity politics, block. I bring this up, as I think it would resolve a subset of the complaints I've seen in this thread and elsewhere.

I wish you could have all your feeds combined, but this appears not to be possible.

snowstormsun• 2 years ago

I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.

wmf4• 2 years ago

Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.

piyuv• 2 years ago

I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?

tqwhite9• 2 years ago

They are trying to avoid that. I hang around there pretty much. I expect premium services subscriptions will be the first try. If that works, and I think it could, that will be fine. The fact of it being a public benefit LLC makes the profitability requirement much less pressing.

Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.

jazzyjackson2• 2 years ago

What does being a public benefit corp actually stop them from doing on a practical level? I'm not familiar with the classification.

I am, on the other hand, familiar with the likes of Blockchain Capital, from whom Bluesky has accepted 15 million dollars in Series A funding. At some point they're going to get crypto wallets and air drops integrated just like Keybase did and the profits will come out of scamming the uninformed.

glenstein17• 2 years ago

I certainly hope it works because rebalancing the world away from X is a win for the world.

I'm not sure we have much precedent for that model working to sustain any form of social media for the masses. It has in my experience been great for specific services (happily paying for pinboard on a yearly subscription!) but I'm not sure it will work for aby service aspiring to be a universal town square.

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

I’ve been very happy on X. My algo keeps showing me memes and tech stuff. Very little political grandstanding… but it did get a little warm during the election.

A lot of Ai guys are X with cool stuff and still a ton of great posts in Japanese if you can read it.

EarthMephit• 2 years ago

Japanese users are migrating rapidly to Bluesky away from X.

Mainly for the extra features, apps & integrations that Bluesky offers:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/11/25/companies/b...

aftbit2• 2 years ago

What ever happened to Secure Scuttlebutt? That seemed like an interesting way to approach this, similar to Nostr perhaps?

yokem55• 2 years ago

One of the people behind SSB was Paul Frazee. He's now the CTO of BlueSky.

tqwhite9• 2 years ago

I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read.

I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.

I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.

Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.

There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.

But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.

Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.

nyclounge• 2 years ago

Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.

Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1]

[1] https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-...

poincaredisk2• 2 years ago

I like, and want to use Bluesky, but I mostly use socials to share my content and engagement is not comparable - I may get 200 "likes" on Twitter and 7 on Bluesky, for example. So while I would like to stop using Twitter, it has no alternative for me, currently.

danielheath• 2 years ago

I have little faith that twitter is accurately reporting like counts, given that inventing bigger numbers is convincing people to stay there.

Zambyte5• 2 years ago

I found posting on Bluesky to be a similar experience to posting on X premium in terms of engagement. I had premium for the entire lifespan of my X account (I made it to play with Grok) and my followers / following ratio has pretty much been exactly the same.

Have you actually promoted your Bluesky account anywhere or spent time engaging with other people the same way you expect people to engage with you?

dom966• 2 years ago

I have stayed away from it for a while, but after my partner switched over to it I decided to delve deeper into it. The openess of Bluesky to developers is a breath of fresh air and the platform itself has some really great features. So I guess you can say I'm a fan now too.

I was also able to create an app on Bluesky that grew to 15k users in less than a month[1]. The Bluesky team was really open to helping me with some rate limits to make sure it could continue running well too. Reddit and Twitter probably had similar vibes when they were starting out, perhaps Bluesky will face the same fate, but there are no guarantees with any platform out there.

1 - https://listifications.app

baggachipz2• 2 years ago

I don't know how long you've been in the space, so forgive me if I seem condescending. Twitter and Facebook used to be extremely open and encouraging to developers. That's how they gained prominence, by allowing... nay, incentivizing developers to use their platform. Once they hit critical mass, that was all unceremoniously ripped away.

Assuming a for-profit venture like Bluesky gains critical mass, it will absolutely happen again.

someothherguyy2• 2 years ago

It seems like any discussion concerning a social media or news media site is quickly filled with polarized takes on its users, editors, moderators, or the organization itself.

ggm3• 2 years ago

Why do you think that is? I no longer use socials outside of this one, and I know a strong element of my continuing use is the moderators and users.

someothherguyy2• 2 years ago

Not sure, maybe its a consequence of being a social human?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_conflict

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_exposure_theory

marcus_holmes2• 2 years ago

I'm really enjoying Mastodon. It's a bit like Usenet back in 1994 - only us geeks there.

To be honest, I'm kinda glad that the Twitterati aren't there; I did not enjoy Twitter when it was in its prime.

Peteragain2• 2 years ago

I imagine there is a large call-centre style barn somewhere for every social media product and the people in it are paid to dis detractors and otherwise act as fan-boys. The article is pointing out a problem with blue sky that we should attend to. Saying "bluesky is great" might be true but ignores the content of the article. (I am now going to watch my whole 24 points on hn disappear and change my name again)

lylo• 2 years ago

It’s an interesting point but social media (especially X and Bluesky) is largely ephemeral content. If it goes away, what have you really lost? Hot takes?

Running your own blog on your own domain is a good idea and anything long-form would be on there not Bluesky, no? The vast majority of people will run their blog on a platform though, be that Wordpress or Bear or Ghost etc all of which (in theory!) could go away. Where does it end?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with my blogging platform (https://pagecord.com). It’s hard not to lock people in with a platform, but most people WANT a platform because it’s easy to use. I’ve made Pagecord open source and I’m working on an export so the whole site can be exported to Jekyll-compliant Markdown, so in theory you could leave and be up and running in a self-hosted way (fairly) easily.

So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve?

Peteragain2• 2 years ago

Good point. Perhaps needs a unique key so transportable content is citable.. DOIs are an example, or ISBNs for the ultimate in transportable content!

glenstein17• 2 years ago

So maybe transportable content standards is the most important thing to solve?

Right, and I would suggest this is what the activitypub protocol is for.

josteink3• 2 years ago

My interest for bluesky is practically non-existent as long as they ban people for posting commonly held views and scientific facts.

I’m not going to invest in a platform where fear of banning is a thing from the get go.

oneeyedpigeon11• 2 years ago

Can you give an example? It sounds like you have something specific in mind.

josteink3• 2 years ago

Things like this? https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6505039/bluesky-bans-lunduke...

And this: https://x.com/clownworld_/status/1858194893249917377?s=46

And this: https://x.com/immeme0/status/1872482191869132932?s=46

Etc. They seem REALLY ban-happy over there.

tjpnz• 2 years ago

They banned Laura Looner for just showing up.

defrahh• 2 years ago

Even worse, they don't ban the users sending death threats and other threats of extreme violence - as Jesse Singal discusses in this article:

https://www.thefp.com/p/jesse-singal-bluesky-has-a-death-thr...

ant6n• 2 years ago

I have tried Bluesky, but for now it seems rather bland. Tried to follow a bunch of people I know from X, but then it kept suggesting astronomy photos or photos of sun up landscapes (with a text like „have a happy new day“).

Little discussion on current events, little interesting insights.

It’s definitely less of a chess pool than twitter, much less random violence and less rage bait as well.

mozarella3• 2 years ago

Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02...

Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...

glenstein17• 2 years ago

Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.

hobs• 2 years ago

When you actually look at what people do instead of what they say, it often shows that that's really the only choice people want.

akvadrako2• 2 years ago

What does he mean there is only one "Bluesky server" ?

You can already run your own Personal data server (for your data), Relay (to aggregate all feeds), AppView (that holds a view of the data), or client (that talks to the AppView).

mozarella3• 2 years ago

Can you seamlessly migrate your account (your id, followers, and posts) to another host without losing said followers? I think that's the main feature Doctrow is looking for?

socksy• 2 years ago

He's almost certainly talking about the AppView. Yes, people run their own PDSes, but afaik no-one is running their own AppViews. It seems prohibitively expensive. Even running a relay requires at a minimum terabytes of storage space (and presumably more when the network gets bigger?).

The AppView - controls the way you can search posts - has the ability to show or hide posts from everyone using that AV - has per-user data such as notifications, last skeet seen etc - is a CDN for media, and as such can filter there - is where the algorithms of what posts to show are implemented

In other words, someone who controls the AppView holds a lot of power in the AT Protocol world.

At the moment, it seems that Bluesky are doing a great job with their AppView, and they've rather magnificently scaled with the extreme load increases in the last months. However, for someone like Doctorow who wants independence from being on someone else's platform, there has to be a viable alternative AppView, or at the very least a documented process for how to host it.

However, it's my personal belief that it's only a matter of time until people do this. I don't know how practical it will be (and what level of resources would be needed to divulge if Bluesky go bad compared to a Mastodon server), but it seems like this is a priority for them, and everything else in the stack has been made easy to self host (see https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q).

madeofpalk4• 2 years ago

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server.

I'm not sure this is up to date, but Bluesky/AT Proto's architecture is pretty complex to wrap my head around so maybe I just misunderstand. The biggest difference is that unlike Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't really have a single concept of an 'instance' that represents an independent segment of the network like Mastodon does. Instead you have PDSs (which is a user and their data), relays (which centrally relay multiple PDSs like a firehose), and the app view (the frontend for visualising the relay and interacting with PDSs).

You can host your own PDS so you are in control of your own data and identity, and you can migrate away from Bluesky-operated PDS to your own, though at the moment you can't migrate back https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR... https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u

Bluesky's AT Proto design has different trade offs to Mastodon. Bluesky seems like the more feature complete, technically superior, twitter-scale design, being expectedly more complex. Mastodon/ActivityPub is easier to boot up something completely decentralised, but hosters often complain about scale. The real test comes down to the resiliancy of the service is the main provider shuts down. At the moment I think Bluesky would suffer a lot more than Mastodon if the company just went away.

laurex• 2 years ago

Recommend this deep dive article to understand some of these issues: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

hypertexthero• 2 years ago

Tim Bray doesn’t trust it, either: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/11/15/Not-Blues...

pessimizer4• 2 years ago

Bluesky's only hope to be anything other than a twitter clone posing as a distributed protocol while hoping that Musk Diggs his own grave, was if it were a rich man's hobby and charity, and Dorsey has long left the building.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.

iteratethis2• 2 years ago

"If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server"

He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server.

First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move.

Second, you can't move an account, you create a new one on another server which produces a new handle. You can move followers over using some clunky process few users would understand. It can take up to 30 days to process and may require multiple tries. In case any blockage happens between your old and new server, it gets even trickier.

Worse, your content cannot be migrated. It is forever stuck at the old server and at the whims of whoever runs it. Same for the redirect from your old account to your new account.

If the point is to have a robust network where your account, content and followers/followings are safe...Mastodon is the worst.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools.

Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:

<https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...>

I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother.

At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts:

<https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.

nunobrito4• 2 years ago

Would be interesting to ask the author for a review of NOSTR afterwards.

At NOSTR the account functions without servers, you get private keys that certify your messages as yours no matter where or when you post them.

From that perspective there isn't a private castle since you can send your messages to any of the several hundred relays existing today. It isn't VC funded but doesn't really cater to woke people and there isn't moderation of any kind.

You follow what you want to read, you can't even block others from writing on your texts. At most you can only ignore their writings.

Heliodex2• 2 years ago

I love Nostr and run my own personal relay, as it's much simpler to set up than a Bluesky or Mastodon instance.

The idea of nonexistent moderation is untrue. The big relays get big because they only commit to the minimum necessary moderation, though there are plenty of smaller or topic-centric relays based on user allowlists, payments (regularly or per note), or admins enforcing pretty standard moderation systems. The system caters just fine to woke people.

'No moderation' isn't always the same as 'Freedom of speech'. Whatever you're posting, there will always be at least one relay willing to take your notes (if not, run your own) which you can broadcast to your followers.

nunobrito4• 2 years ago

That's the thing. I can troll you across all your relays and others.

You can't really stop a targeted attacker. Sure you can always add a few "IF's" as disclaimer and nitpick all you want, reality is that moderation is defacto non-existent for the overwhelming majority of relays.

As a challenge, try to see for yourself what is posted to them without any filters or WoT algorithms, then you see the unfettered amount of material getting published. Of course that is small relays you can enable whitelisting and so forth, but those are corner cases. They are not the norm.

dom966• 2 years ago

there isn't moderation of any kind

How can this possibly work? What if someone posts illegal content?

nunobrito4• 2 years ago

Well, tough luck.

Of course that app providers want to keep their customers returning, so they will try to show you the most interesting posts while keeping other stuff away.

But the thing is to try yourself. One of the fastest app provider is Primal, you can find it here and register an account for posting any kind of stuff you want under 5 seconds: https://primal.net/

Will someone read your stuff? That is a different topic. Because new accounts tend to be ignored no matter what you post, usually you have to first interact with existing users and build up your credit score if you want to get noticed.

lucasRW• 2 years ago

I'm very happy with X, once you do a bit of tuning.

Tepix• 2 years ago

The fact that replies of paid accounts come first killed it for me. Paid accounts' posts are more often than not less interesting.

SiempreViernes2• 2 years ago

communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server

[links to a github issue that is 90% internal project bureocracy, 10% "didn't read the terms"].

I think this is actually another instance of the "people don't actually want to pay for choice": the moderation policies for the big social sites are just incomprehensible, but you don't have any agency over them if you use the sites, which is simple.

On Mastodon you do get to choose what moderation you subject yourself to (to some extent), but obviously making that choice requires work since there are real differences.

glenstein17• 2 years ago

I had a record scratch moment at that point in the article also. For one I'm not so sure that the masses are going through server by server looking up content polices with a microscope. They're just signing up and posting.

For those who need them, they are accessible enough, and in fact I think it was the population looking for those that was effectively the first movers onto Mastodon.

__alexs• 2 years ago

What about Bluesky prevents a Twitter situation where the board just decide to sell it to whoever will make them richest?

kalleboo4• 2 years ago

Going more to the topic of the article rather than platform wars:

In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain.

So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic HTML page on my own website[0]. That way, if my Mastodon account ever goes away, all the threads I actually put any effort into are preserved.

[0] https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ I'm intro retrotech so this site is designed/constructed so aside from the videos it works fine on a Mac with a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. All the data is stored in a big JSON file so I can re-format it whenever I want.

ikesau• 2 years ago

this is really cool! thanks for sharing :)

kalleboo4• 2 years ago

Thanks!

I would have released the source, but it's just a big ball of PHP since that was the easiest thing to use to just pull some JSON off of mastodon and template it into HTML.

appplication• 2 years ago

This is an interesting concept, and I mean no offense, but is this just essentially a public journal/demo concept for a low data web page? I’m having a hard time imagining folks will spend any time saving/ intentionally re-visiting such a site, except for e.g. posting on here for curious folks to browse through.

antonios• 2 years ago

Regarding Bluesky's decentralization: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

(hint: not that decentralized after all)

goykasi• 2 years ago

Bluesky is not decentralized. It is a reference app built on top of a decentralized, social networking protocol -- AT Protocol.

edavis3• 2 years ago

For anybody else coming across this, a reply was made here: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

Bit of a side note for my fellow protocol enjoyers: this site is WhiteWind which is another app on the atproto network. Bluesky is a microblogging app on atproto while WhiteWind is a long form blogging app on the same network. It's pretty neat.

And Christine replied to the reply here which I believe is the terminus of this conversation: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

LittleTimothy4• 2 years ago

I think the entire attitude of the author coming in to this is wrong. It's zero sum. It's an assumption that you're either gaining from the platform or the platform is gaining from you. This is wrong. The platform has network effects that make everyone well off. Google owns Youtube, yes it gets enormous value from creating/owning the platform. But Youtube isn't exploiting Mr Beast, Mr Beast also gains enormous value from the platform and provides enormous value to the platform, it's a symbiotic relationship.

Sure, it's true at some point that the Platform could, for whatever reason, decide it would rather suck you dry than continue the symbiotic relationship, that does happen.

But here's the core of the problem - by putting yourself half out of the platform, trying to direct people off to your own website, by gating your content etc. You are damaging the platform. All that massive surplus that is created by having everyone in one place sharing in one common way? It won't exist if you're not participating in it.

I can open a shop in the centre of london. I'm going to pay high rents, but I'm also going to gain massive benefits from all the people in London who can come and buy stuff from my shop. It's a win for everyone. You're going to open a shop in the centre of London and when someone walks in the front door you're going to say "Oh well here's all the stuff I sell, but to actually buy it you need to come visit my farm in Norfolk". You see how this doesn't make sense right?

And laying aside whether you should do this, any platform that wants to survive is going to massively penalize your behaviour because you're freeloading, you're damaging the platform. You want surplus but you don't want to let anyone else benefit.

austin-cheney3• 2 years ago

But what if Google changes the TOS for YouTube and puts Mr. Beast out of business? Should that guy just retire and be happy with what he got?

LittleTimothy4• 2 years ago

If Youtube put Mr Beast out of business today, they would still have paid him an enormous amount of money over the course of years. Not to mention the hundred million dollar Amazon Prime deal that came out this week, and his Feastables brand.

This isn't an academic exercise, do we see anyone outside of the platforms gaining the success that the creators inside the platforms do? I'd be happy to note anyone I've just totally missed, but these platforms really do actually work.

rors2• 2 years ago

The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to setting up a physical retail store in London. Even if I do well with my shop, I won't outperform my neighbour 1000x.

If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alphabet is incentivised to keep him happy so that he doesn't move to X. I'm sure they consider his needs before they change their algorithm, at the expense of almost all other creators on YouTube.

LittleTimothy4• 2 years ago

Again you've gone straight back to zero sum thinking. There's no reason Alphabet keeping Mr Beast happy has to be bad for you! It might be good for you! It might be - in fact it almost certainly is true - that the changes that Mr Beast gets youtube to make might be good for everyone.

The network effects of the platform are massive. 90% of that surplus can go to Alphabet and it still be a good deal for average creators. Mr Beast, you, me anyone can go and rent a server tomorrow and start serving their own videos. People still choose to go to youtube because there's just so much surplus value there.

epolanski4• 2 years ago

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much?

Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.

simplyluke• 2 years ago

There’s a broadly believed myth that it produces meaningful professional opportunities among certain folks in the industry. In my observations this is very rarely true, and in many more cases it’s a professional liability.

dom966• 2 years ago

It's not a myth. I got 2 amazing offers (one of which is now my job) via Twitter. I hope Bluesky can eventually offer the same.

michaelbuckbee• 2 years ago

This is highly dependent on what particular professional niche you're in.

Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc.

A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online.

Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle.

There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.

aswanson• 2 years ago

Humans have a need to be heard, hear, argue, and cheer. Human nature.

dartos5• 2 years ago

Some people think it’s fun.

khafra3• 2 years ago

On Twitter I get to see interactions between the people that built games I played as a kid, famous actors, Nobel prize winners, heads of state, and authors I had assumed died decades ago. If I write something insightful and relevant enough, I might get a gesture of appreciation from a FAANG research director, a prominent philosopher, or just someone who writes the funniest aphorisms I've ever seen.

It's toxic in some ways; sure--but it's easy to care about.

dingnuts4• 2 years ago

sounds like an interactive tabloid.

who gives a shit about famous people? authors I assumed died decades ago? Literally I do not give a single shit what Stephen King or JK Rowling thinks

have fun with that, but you just explained why it never appealed to me. Weird idolatry. Reddit has the same problem.

Interesting people talk about ideas, not other people

something insightful enough

you mean if you play the game and are sufficiently blessed by the algorithm your demigod may offer you a blessing. The algorithm doesn't reward insight, lol.

epolanski4• 2 years ago

I can see your point, the issue is that those rare insightful interactions are buried under tons of scrolling, irrelevant content, and people desperately trying to get noticed for whatever reason.

bumby• 2 years ago

I have felt that pull myself, but can't help that even the "gesture of appreciation" is a somewhat hollow and superficial feeling of status. From that standpoint, I don't know that it's all that good of a signal to chase especially given the larger context of the limitations of Twitter.

greentxt• 2 years ago

Usenet was better in every way. We could go back, with little friction, and everything would be better. Oh, but you can't sell ads.

Stevvo• 2 years ago

The author references gaming in his post. If your game is not on social media nobody knows it exists and you have no customers. You are right about the toxicity and gamers are some of the most toxic. But they live almost entirely online, and you have to reach them where they are.

bondarchuk• 2 years ago

All social media is bad, except for the ones you personally use? If it's about discussing pseudo/anonymously, you can do that on other plaforms too, right?

epolanski4• 2 years ago

You can't possibly miss the huge difference between a discussion board and doom scrolling machines.

madeofpalk4• 2 years ago

Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much?
Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity

I believe commerical, closed social networks are the ones that specifically breed this 'toxicity' people talk about. They're incentivised to promote engagement bait to drive DAU, page views and ad revenue.

Granted, it's audience is significantly smaller, but I think Mastodon immediately showed what a social network that had incentives aligned with users could look like. Bluesky has neat features putting users in control, like user-built custom moderation settings to hide things you don't want to see (like engagement-bait accounts, politics, spoilers, gaming etc). I think these are all user-centric features that Twitter or Facebook would never add people they conflict with their other business goals of promoting ads or other partner content.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

fair question. it's the only social interaction for most people. i know one guy that chats with their alexa device to pass time

brodouevencode• 2 years ago

Reddit

Reddit is the center of toxicity. One dissenting opinion and mods banish you.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

Because there is money to be made on whichever platform manages to trap the largest number of active users.

jrflowers2• 2 years ago

Going to guess that they get some sort of enjoyment or value out of them, their definition of “worth contributing to” is different from yours, or they do not share your standard of what “educated people” should do with themselves on the internet

alfor• 2 years ago

Why move away from X?

mhale• 2 years ago

To have the best of all worlds:

- your own blog on a domain you control

- effortless crossposting to bluesky, mastodon, threads, linkedin, and others

Then micro.blog is a great solution!

It follows the POSSE principle: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

see: https://micro.blog/about/crosspost

jacooper• 2 years ago

Honestly bluesky flopped, just like threads and mastodon did.

This is a fact BTW. Activity on bluesky has taken a nosedive. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

What makes Twitter, Twitter didn't move to bluesky. It's still clearly a niche platform, with only a certain group of people using it.

On Twitter you can follow tech, politics (English and in other languages), sports and more almost in real time, as things are happening. It's this relevancy and variety that keeps me using Twitter, and bluesky never got this.

It feels like you are within your own bubble, following a few accounts posting bad jokes here and there, and that's it.

It's a shame really, bluesky was the first platform that could actually could replace Twitter, its decentralization is seamless, an important thing for new non-techie users and it didn't just want to become text based Instagram, but people are now very reluctant after two failed attempts, so it just didn't work out.

fud101• 2 years ago

I finally just caved and joined twitter. I've done it a few times before but this time it was surprisingly pleasant. Was able to use my google account and see posts. I find it refreshing. I don't know why we thought Musk ruined twitter (maybe he did) but as a user I am actually on board with whatever he did since I could never get into twitter in the past.

nemo44x2• 2 years ago

Yeah Twitter/X has been great since many of the scolds and hall monitors were chased away. There's open discussions from all sides, even the more unsavory ones, and the communities that were not propped up by the scolds and hall monitors are as vibrant as ever. It's not perfect but I think more people feel comfortable posting there now and can speak frankly and openly.

A few accounts I liked left but I guess I don't really miss them as new accounts have filled their space. It could also be the communities I use Twitter for weren't affected by the culture change at Twitter.

Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again

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