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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Be wary of Bluesky
kaboomshebang wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Reading some of the comments here. Perhaps the key to solid
decentralization is solving the self-hosting problem. If self-hosting
digital tools will always be a hassle to
manage/update/maintain/upgrade/etc, then we will always rely on third
parties. Almost every human owns a powerful device, but almost none
have the know-how to run their own services. (That's why we rely on
others, which has it's tradeoffs; honestly BlueSky seems a better
tradeoff then Twitter, at least for now ;)
rambambram wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
I don't get it. What's wrong with a website and email address on your
own domain, so you can be part of the decentralized world wide web?
vibeprofessor wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
X is way better than bluesky
__mharrison__ wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
As much as a dumpster fire as Twitter is, it is the best place for all
things AI related. I'm on Bluesky, but find little benefit from it.
user205738 wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
It's also the best place to subscribe to artists and generally find
them.
It's also strange that this is not mentioned, but in X it's easy to
customize the feed for yourself and block what you don't like. I only
see what I'm interested in, and I've never come across any content
lately that I'm not happy with.
lpcvoid wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
Since AI is a grift, I guess that makes it a perfect topic for
Twitter indeed.
raincole wrote 14 hours 28 min ago:
> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad,
we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
I don't get it. What is this supposed to mean? Is the author implying
people won't leave Twitter? If it's true then this whole article is
pure waste of time: if people won't switch to BlueSky anyway then why
should we be wary of it?
BlueSky is a direct alternative to Twitter. The UI is a spitting image
of Twitter's. The whole premise of BlueSky is that people will leave
Twitter when it goes bad.
p1anecrazy wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
I believe s/he means that it as if the users are leaving X for
BlueSky for decentralization, but actually they are facing a similar
lock-in.
fortran77 wrote 15 hours 29 min ago:
Bluesky has already turned evil. Even though nobodyâs on it, I use
Mastodon
bigyabai wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
I'm not on Bluesky, but "evil" is the kind of unqualified hyperbole
that makes me curious what I'm missing out on.
danrobi wrote 15 hours 36 min ago:
Paul Frazeeâs. From Dat to AT Protocol:
Paul Frazeeâs decision to archive the Beaker Browser project in
December 2022 and shift focus from the Dat protocol (now evolved as
Hypercore) to the development of the AT Protocol indeed represents a
significant pivot in his career.
Many observers in the decentralized-web community, including yourself,
continue to regard the pure peer-to-peer architecture of Dat and Beaker
as an elegant and philosophically pure approach to user-controlled data
and hosting.
It is understandable to view this transition as a regrettable departure
from what appeared, at the time, to be the most coherent solution.
To provide context grounded in Frazeeâs own documented reflections,
he invested several years (2016â2022) in Beaker as a peer-to-peer
browser built atop Dat/Hypercore. The system enabled one-click website
creation, forking of sites, and early experiments with social
applications such as Rotonde and Fritter.
However, in his official post-mortem on the Beaker archive notice,
Frazee outlined the practical limitations that led to discontinuation.
[1] He explicitly noted that the project ânever solved the hard
problemsâ required for broad adoption, particularly for dynamic
social networking.
In a more detailed 2024 essay titled âWhy isnât Bluesky a
peer-to-peer network?,â Frazee elaborated on the specific
shortcomings of pure peer-to-peer models when applied to large-scale
social systems.
He concluded that insisting on a fully device-hosted peer-to-peer
network for a mainstream social platform âwouldâve been a
mistake,â given usersâ unwillingness to sacrifice features or
reliability for theoretical decentralization benefits.
The AT Protocol, which Frazee helped architect as Blueskyâs CTO (a
role he continues to hold as of early 2026), represents a deliberate
hybrid synthesis rather than an abandonment of prior principles.
It retains core peer-to-peer innovationsâcryptographically signed
user data repositories, hosting agility, Merkle-tree-based
verification, and portable identitiesâwhile delegating aggregation,
indexing, and high-scale delivery to dedicated infrastructure (Personal
Data Servers, relays, and AppViews).
This design enables the data sovereignty and forkability that
Dat/Beaker championed, while delivering the performance,
discoverability, and moderation capabilities necessary for widespread
use.
The ongoing FreeSky initiative, discussed in our prior exchange,
further advances this by providing independent Personal Data Servers
and relays, reducing reliance on Bluesky-operated infrastructure and
realizing more of the original portability vision.
The Dat/Hypercore protocol itself was not discontinued; it continues
under the Holepunchto organization and powers other applications. Thus,
the technical lineage persists in parallel.
In technology development, particularly within decentralized systems,
iterative refinement based on empirical constraints is common.
Frazee has publicly framed the transition as an application of lessons
from multiple prior projects (including Secure Scuttlebutt and CTZN)
rather than a repudiation.
Whether one regards the shift as a misstep or a pragmatic evolution
depends on the relative weighting of ideological purity versus
practical adoption and usability at scale.
Blueskyâs growth to millions of users and the expanding AT Protocol
ecosystem suggest the hybrid model has achieved broader traction than
pure peer-to-peer social experiments previously attained.
In summary, FreeSky embodies the practical "alternative" envisioned in
early AT Protocol discussionsâoffering decentralized hosting and
tools within the Bluesky-compatible network rather than a separate
platform. For those interested in trying it, start by exploring custom
handles through freesky.social or reviewing the dashboard for
operational insights. Additional details are available via Project
Liberty announcements and AT Protocol documentation at atproto.com
HTML [1]: https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/blob/master/archive-no...
ogundipeore wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
I always wondered why people donât adopt protocols like Nostr as
much? At least with nostr you know you can use your private key on any
other platform that supports it as a valid auth.
The other problem of who owns the relay where the data is stored still
exists. One way to solve this is a scheduled query of your data and
keeping a local dump
verdverm wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
If anything in this thread has you interested in atproto, there is a
conference in Vancouver, BC at the end of March
HTML [1]: https://atmosphereconf.org/?ref=verdverm.hn
__MatrixMan__ wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
The question of whether the users are actually ready to defend is
irrelevant if the attackers look at the defenses and decide that an
attack isn't worth mounting. As we have learned, this is not a credible
threat:
> It will be hard, but we'll self host if we have to
Bluesky offers:
> It will be easy-ish, and we'll self host if we have to
We shall see if it's credible enough to make corruption look elsewhere.
highway900 wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
All software has trade offs. The âfor youâ feed is ran on a home
server, this is already imho a better situation than other systems.
This could be cut off. But it could also be stood up again.
verdverm wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
It could also be like The Seed from SAO, giving rise to 1000s more
indolering wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
If you get rid of data portability, then isn't it basically a
Mattermost server? What is the alternative without going full Nostr
where you have to manage all the cryptography yourself?
Either you handle the cryptography for the user AND allow them to DIY
it or your target demographic is purely crypto anarchists willing to
put up with a shitty UX.
elAhmo wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server.
In practice, running your own mail server is painful and everyone just
uses Gmail. The protocol being "open" didn't prevent centralization.
This is an odd take and hard to agree with. I have never seen anyone
complaining that email is a centralised service. GMail might be among
the most popular solution, but there is a number of other solutions for
"regular consumers", and many institutions, governments, etc. all run
their email servers.
thom wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
Left usenet, left IRC, left LiveJournal, skipped MySpace, left
Facebook, left the blogosphere, will leave Twitter and BlueSky.
Youâre either in touching distance of grass or youâre not, none of
this matters.
holler wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
MySpace was the last fun social network, bummer you missed it!
dadrian wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
For someone to come in and buy Bluesky and then hold everyoneâs data
hostage, then Bluesky would actually have to have enough value that
someone would want to buy it.
kevinak wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
VCs have put in $120 million, so someone thinks that it's worth
something.
heisenbit wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
I suspect European courts would take a dim view on preventing export
through switching off an existing mechanism yielding portability.
yellowapple wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every
layer, almost nobody does.
And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's nothing
stopping anyone from fixing that âalmost nobody doesâ problem. The
fact that such a thing is even possible, and that it's seamless to move
from one to the other, gives ATproto a massive leg-up compared to even
other federated systems, let alone its non-federated predecessors.
phantomathkg wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
Fixing the problem requires 2 resources, the knowhow and the money.
People need to know how to execute it safely, and people need to have
the disposable income to run their PDS.
Even for tech people in HN, not everyone will have the disposable
income to self-hosted every digital life lands on. Somehow, somewhere
one may need to use free services paid by VC money.
bccdee wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Yeah they're describing a real problem, but the cause of that
problemâa seamless centralized sign-up funded by VC moneyâis the
reason bluesky took off to begin with.
Bsky offers an on-ramp to a more decentralized experience, but most
people won't pay the money and experience the friction to move take
that ramp. Platforms like Mastodon are entirely decentralized, but
that means the friction of decentralizing happens immediately upon
sign-up. The people who don't want to self-host PDSes never signed up
for Mastodon to begin with.
I try to be skeptical, but I feel like bsky (or something like it) is
the best way can do re: bringing decentralization to the masses.
coldtea wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
>And at every layer except for maybe the PLC directory, there's
nothing stopping anyone from fixing that âalmost nobody doesâ
problem.
If there's nothing stopping anyone from fixing a problem, and yet
nobody fixes it, then there's something is stopping them.
Might not be a technical impossibility, or a gun in their head. Could
be as simple as inertia or addiction.
But saying "the problem is totally solvable" just because there's a
solution available, is pretty naive. Solutions have costs themselves,
and not all are created equal or equally feasible.
tyre wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
Or people don't think it's a problem!
Maybe there are a ton of people who joined Bluesky because twitter
devolved into a room-temperature-IQ right-wing hell hole, not
because they cared about federation or whatever.
Everything has trade-offs. Again and again people choose
centralized services because they are a better product.
coldtea wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
>Or people don't think it's a problem!
Often that's a problem on its own (e.g. climate change)
oskarw85 wrote 15 hours 55 min ago:
It's exactly that. I have an account on Mastodon that I haven't
opened in months. I use Bluesky a couple of times a day. On
Mastodon I couldn't find interesting accounts to follow for
weeks. On Bluesky I was up and running after an hour thanks to
starter packs. Ease of use trumps (what a word!) philosophy for
me. And probably most other people too.
BTW I already lost 10 years of posting on Twitter. Did not care
for a second. Do people REALLY care about their postings on micro
blog sites? It's not like a box of photographs that I would pass
to my children on my deathbed...
black_puppydog wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
Just FYI, starter packs were implemented on Mastodon, or
rather, around Mastodon quite a while ago, so maybe give it
another shot.
That being said, the nature of Mastodon does still make it more
difficult to find interesting accounts.
davidgerard wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
A relay or appview needs a ton of resources. Blacksky finally
created the second ever real-world usable appview instance after
2.5 years.
Also, the open source version of the appview doesn't work at
Bluesky scale. You need a proprietary database for sufficient
speed.
AT Proto is completely decentralised, except for all the structural
and financial points of absolute centralisation.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
The relay is not that bad, the only really bad part is building
an index, and most apps on the atmosphere have no need to index
bluesky records, so the economics for them look very different.
The work towards permissioned data and group-shared data will
make it so apps can choose their own levels of "decentralization"
of "federation" on atproto primitives. For example, two diametric
options
1. An app that is not open source code, but still does all the
same atproto credible exit stuff. Naturally leans into
winner-take-all
2. An app that is tied to community, think something like
Discord, where most servers don't care about what other servers
are doing. Each community could run their own version and only
care about their data. This is raspberry pi hostable.
wmf wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
It's really the defaults that need to be fixed and anyone cannot
change those.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
Which defaults do you think need to change?
wmf wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I assume the onboarding steers everyone to one PDS provider and
the mobile apps only use one appview server.
kelvinjps10 wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
I feel it enters now in the territory of being more confusing
for users and having less adoption.
It's tricky to create a decentralized network for the masses.
nine_k wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
Torrents are a decentralized network for the masses. It works
because it does not matter where you enter it.
wmf wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
Just don't tell the users anything about it.
kevinak wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
How would they fix it?
yellowapple wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
I don't think âtheyâ have a whole lot to fix. It's more a
matter of people needing to fix their own laziness.
I'll be the first to admit I'm guilty of this, too, and still
haven't gotten around to moving my main account to a self-hosted
PDS (though I've at least taken the steps to backup my CAR and set
my own rotation keys, such that if my PDS goes offline or hostile I
can still migrate away from it).
verdverm wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
I explained in another comment you also replied to. It's not
broken, it works as intended, the plan is for improvements and
de-risking.
Is there something missing from my answer about what the plan is
for the PLC?
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47104673
SilverElfin wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
With all the talk of LinkedInâs problematic verification process and
potential issues with Persona verification service being linked to
Peter Thiel, I wonder why a social network like Bluesky couldnât
replace LinkedIn. What would it take?
notpushkin wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
Getting everybody to sign up and start using it like a LinkedIn.
Network effects at play.
throwa356262 wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
"Find me online
Nostr
Twitter
YouTube"
Sounds like he was worried so much he left Bluesky already.
thangalin wrote 1 day ago:
> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server.
In practice, running your own mail server is painful.
Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a working,
useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-agnostic, and
re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take scads of effort. Now that LLMs
abound, much of that grind is quickly solved. For example, here's a
vibe-coded script that to get dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set
up on my new server with mailboxes copied from an old server: [1] To
vibe code it, the prompt included content from: [2] After a few kicks
at the can (run script, capture errors, feed errors to LLM, repeat), it
finally configured a working system. Reviewing the script, yes, it's
beyond painful. It doesn't have to be, though; the authors of complex
software could produce similar guided installers.
HTML [1]: https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt
HTML [2]: https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutoria...
Arainach wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Writing code isn't the hard part of running an email server. Getting
your server not marked as spam is essentially impossible, not a
coding problem, and why everyone gives up on this.
newsoftheday wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
> Writing code isn't the hard part of running an email server.
Getting your server not marked as spam is essentially impossible
I've run my own since the 1990's, it is certainly possible, there
are many others who have done the same. I have no issues with email
deliverability.
> everyone gives up on this.
Not everyone gives up on it, some do, some don't.
fluoridation wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
Have you tried setting up a new one, though?
localuser13 wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
I set up several email servers over the past 10 years (my
personal one, my new personal one, one for my small company),
and it worked every time.
I think legends about email being impossible to set up are
greatly exaggregated.
DoctorOW wrote 1 day ago:
> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad,
we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
But they migrated to Bluesky, right? So it played out fine?
kevinak wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
Right, but they couldn't take their social graph with them. They
essentially had to start from scratch.
pfraze wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah Iâm the guy quoted in the opening of the article.
Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. Thatâs our whole point. Run the
infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies.
Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are
able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time
and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being
factored into an independent org.
kevinak wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
Moving the PLC to an independent org doesn't make it decentralized.
Spivak wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
Does the existence of did:web make it decentralized? You don't have
to use the centralized identity provider at all. And if you own a
domain why would you?
kevinak wrote 12 hours 29 min ago:
In theory, yes. In practice, not really, since the vast majority
of users won't care to do it.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
I don't seem any claim in GP's comment that it would make it
decentralized. It does seem, by looking across your comments in
this thread, that
(1) You feel very strongly about what decentralized means w.r.t.
social media, bluesky, and the PLC
(2) ATProto accepts that it's not planned to be as decentralized as
some want, and that it is currently centralized with secondary
validators.
(3) No answer or plan for the PLC is going to satisfy you. Nor is
any argument you make going to change the plans for identity in
ATProto for the foreseeable future.
This is all fine, people can have different perspectives and
work/play in different ecosystems, no one is right or wrong. This
is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there and bridges
between them.
May I then ask why you keep making comments to the same effect aas
those you made in the post and multiple times here ~12h ago?
southerntofu wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
> This is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there
and bridges between them.
Yes, that's great! What's not great is Bluesky attempting a
hostile takeover on federated and decentralized social networks.
It's been advertised from day 1 as an alternative to centralized
silos and it's a lie. [0]
To be fair, projects like Blacksky try to decentralize it (except
the identity server, as it's impossible??), and there's now a
vibrant developer community around ATProto. That doesn't make the
centralization and false marketing claims any less problematic.
Develop the protocol you want. Don't lure my friends into it by
pretending it's something that it's not.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
kevinak wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
The whole premise of a free social media protocol is that it is
resistant to hostile takeovers. All issues stem from this.
1. I absolutely feel very strongly about decentralization. If
there is a part of the stack that isn't it opens up the whole
project to the kind of issues I'm talking about in the blog post.
2. Then it is not made to be resistant to the above problems
3. Actually, this is where you are wrong! If atproto implemented
a more robust, decentralized default identity system I would be a
very happy camper.
I make comments because I care about the subject, obviously. I
use Bluesky a lot and I don't want it to end up like Twitter.
evbogue wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
I'd like to encourage anyone who is wary of Bluesky to check out Paul
(and Dominic's) back-in-the-day project Secure-Scuttlebot which
solved most of the issues that Bluesky suffers from by using content
addressable storage and signing key cryptography correctly.
The actual SSB codebase has been kind of broken since 2020, but I
have a fork on my own Github that works and comes with a basic client
that you can vibe/claw on top of: [1] I'm happy to supply pub invites
to anyone who wants to play around with the old sbot with me as we
work towards making social media distributed again.
HTML [1]: https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc
sydbarrett74 wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Kudos, evbogue. Thank you for the hard work you've done to keep
this alive.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
> Secure-Scuttlebot which solved most of the issues that Bluesky
suffers from
I've heard Paul speak about this the other way around, that the
experience from SSB informed the design of ATProto. I.e. ATProto
solves most of the issues in SSB
For clarity, ATProto is the protocol, Bluesky is one dozens of
apps, obv the biggest and most well known outside of the
ATmosphere.
evbogue wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
Bluesky does solve a lot of SSBs problems. Both projects can
learn from each other. The past can become the future and the
present inform the past.
This isn't just on Paul, Jay has publically stated that she
doesn't believe users (even powerusers) can be trusted with
keypairs.
yellowapple wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
Jay's unfortunately not wrong about that. Hitting that balance
between âso secure even I can't access it anymoreâ v. âso
convenient that cybercriminals can access it, tooâ is less
trivial than a lot of the âjust use keypairsâ crowd likes
to admit â even for those of us with many years of experience
working with SSH and PGP keys, let alone people who haven't the
slightest idea what a âkeypairâ even is.
advael wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
Keypairs are fairly easy to use if you're on a reasonable
unix-like OS and if you're not then frankly nothing is easy
to use. Unfortunately this does mean that your statement is
true for the majority of devices people use to access social
media
evbogue wrote 19 hours 43 min ago:
It can be both.
bjoli wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Considering how hard it has been, and to some extent still is, to run
your own Bluesky instance, the main problem is that it automatically
becomes centralised in a way that no open protocol will solve.
If 97% of your users are on one instance it is not a distributed
platform. Applying this to mastodon, I am pretty sure most people
would consider it a problem if mastodon.social started getting more
than 40% of active users (currently at about 15 iirc).
pentagrama wrote 1 day ago:
Site is down at this moment.
Archived:
HTML [1]: https://archive.ph/PsTrp
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
There seems to be an issue with the caching mechanism that I built.
In the meantime the article is also on Nostr if anyone wants to read
it: [1] Thanks for the heads up!
HTML [1]: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552a...
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
I've never looked at the AT Protocol before. It seems like you could
have achieved most of that with existing DNS, HTTP and RSS
implementations. All they really needed was some file formats and some
well known URL schems and all of this could have been far easier to
implement and deploy.
davidgerard wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
It's very much a Not Invented Here of Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Bluesky is a good user experience insofar as it's centralised.
Mastodon is a bad user experience insofar as you're forced to be
aware of the decentralisation.
If you want successful decentralisation, Mastodon has that out of the
box. You can stand up a Mastodon, Akkoma, GotoSocial etc on a $5/mo
VM and you're an equal participant immediately. Or you can join
someone else's server.
ActivityPub is underspecified and Mastodon just ignored a lot of it
and so the actual protocol is an unholy mishmash of the two. It
mostly works though, by the process of people beating on it until it
works.
With Bluesky, you have a centralised service and a lot of people
saying "decentralised!"
AT Proto is theoretically decentralised in the fabulous future and
points of absolute and financial centralisation keep turning up.
I spend all day posting to both, fwiw. They each do a particular job.
But the "decentralisation" in Bluesky is fake. Or at best, simply not
feasiblly true.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
This is a good article [1] to get an overview of the "backend" of the
protocol, it's very plug-n-play. One question I have about the setup
you describe, how does moderation work? ATProto has the best
moderation scheme I know of, "stacked." [2] [1]
HTML [1]: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
HTML [2]: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
jeswin wrote 1 day ago:
True p2p is the only approach that will work, not federation. I'd go
futher and make the protocol high-friction for federation.
It's true that many p2p attempts have failed, but it's also the only
solution that doesn't require someone running servers for free. There's
evidence of success as well: napster (and bittorrent). Both were wildly
successful, and ultimately died because of legal issues. It might work
when the data is yours to share.
pessimizer wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
I sort of agree, but federation is good. It's funny that you use
bittorrent as an example because it involves every single user
running servers for free.
If people can both be an origin for content and a relay for content,
and modulate the extent to which they want to do either of those
things, there's not really much of a difference between "federation"
and "true" p2p. Some people will be all relay, and some people will
be all content. Some content people might be paying relays, and some
relays might be paying content people. Some relays will be private
and some relays will be public. Some people will maintain all of
their own content locally, and some people will leave it all on a
specialized remote server as a service and not even care about
holding a local copy.
Also, browsing would either have to be done through a commercial or
public service (federation again), or through specialized software
(no one will ever use this and operating systems will intentionally
lock it out if they see it as a competitor.)
The problem with wishing this all into existence, though, is that
bittorent (not dead) exists and is completely stagnant. There is
often a lot of talk about improving the protocol, and the various
software dealing with it, and none of it gets done. If bittorrent
would just allow torrents to be updated (content added or removed),
you could almost piggyback social media on it immediately. It's not
getting done. Nobody is doing it, just writing specs that everybody
ignores for decades.
So I guess my belief is that "true p2p" is a meaningless term and
target when it comes to creating recognizable social media. "True
p2p" would be within a private circle of friends, on specialized
software. Might as well be a fancy e.g. XMPP group chat; it's already
available for anyone who wants it. Almost nobody wants it. Telegram,
Whatsapp, and imessage are already good enough for that. They may not
be totally private, but they're private enough for 99.9999% of
people's purposes, and people are very suspicious of the 0.0001% who
want something stronger.
I actually think you're using "true p2p" here to sort of handwave a
business model into existence (trying to imply mutuality, or barter,
or something.) Whereas I think the business model is the part that
needs to be engineered carefully and the tech is easy.
throwaway0665 wrote 1 day ago:
I can't imagine a world where a p2p social network is practical. Not
when each node is an unreliable mobile phone that's maybe on
cellular. Even with something like ipfs you have pinning services,
bittorrent has seed boxes, because pure p2p is impractical.
jeswin wrote 1 day ago:
You can have your other devices and friends replicating.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
That uses a lot of bandwidth and battery. I'd rather find a
better way to pay for servers than try to avoid them.
ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
For more atproto, see their recently redesigned homepage
HTML [1]: https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote 1 day ago:
Bluesky's behavior here isn't surprising.
They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block
alias emails to their unban support address too.
fsckboy wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
what's an email alias? (in the sense that they would know you were
using one)
verdverm wrote 19 hours 37 min ago:
I believe they mean the `email+alias@domain.com` (I forget the
order)
beders wrote 1 day ago:
This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that
you can use for free is nauseating.
This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to
operate.
If you don't like that, go elsewhere.
If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the
internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks.
Just look at the plethora of free services you get.
In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
I do advocate for using other networks (specifically Nostr) that are
not designed like this, but the network effect is big and most of my
friends are on Blue Sky because they have been lured into a false
sense of âitâs decentralised, I can just move! If something bad
happensâ.
beders wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
The reason they are on Bluesky is that it just works, its client
just works and the barrier of entry is low. Oh, and others they
want to follow are on there. That's it.
No regular user cares about - oh my data, it is stored centrally,
how evil!
That is just not a problem most people have. Like at all.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
What reasons do your friends give for choosing Bluesky over Nostr.
I cannot imagine they would give the same reason you are projecting
onto them.
jongjong wrote 1 day ago:
If anything gets too popular too quickly, I just assume it's a PsyOp.
That kind of growth requires extensive media coordination and big
money. If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product. As
sure as gravity.
davidgerard wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
Bluesky growth spurts are always when Musk or (less frequently)
Zuckerberg step on their dicks again and more people come over from
their services. In between are slow declines.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
Growth was negative for about a year, it has started growing again
this year.
HTML [1]: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...
icehawk wrote 1 day ago:
> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad,
we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
Yeah, it played out with my whole social circle leaving, as evidenced
by the fact that all my friends link me to the bluesky post whenever
there's something happening now.
newsoftheday wrote 23 hours 37 min ago:
I know noone on BlueSky, I do have friends on X. We liked Twitter and
we like X.
verdverm wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
I salute the solidarity /s
Joking aside, I think what we see in the larger scheme is a
fracturing of social media. More choice, more competition.
This is a good thing
red75prime wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
More choice, more competition, more echochambers.
luqtas wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
> More choice, more competition. This is a good thing.
hopefully one day we lurk at the same protocol and type: with
more federations, more choice. This is a good thing.
beanjuiceII wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
same here
vvpan wrote 1 day ago:
> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every
layer, almost nobody does.
But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of
people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. But also I don't
understand why any of this is a reason to be "wary", it's a great place
to be with some unique technical properties - it is way more "open"
than any other platform of similar scale.
bo1024 wrote 1 day ago:
> But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of
people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well.
The post discusses why, when all is not well, it will be too late.
EA-3167 wrote 1 day ago:
At this point I despair at anyone who doesnât understand that the
problem isnât the specific architecture, itâs social media as a
scaled up, algorithmically driven concept. Stick so many people on
one social graph that canât possibly be effectively moderated by
humans and it will turn into the same pit every time.
publius_frog wrote 1 day ago:
(Throwaway account.)
Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own data, so
that's enough, right?"
Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into the
did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate
transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web accounts by
manually setting DNS records.
So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting into
this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers this, but
maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from missing the point.
Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which control
users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to include more
functionality that prevents users from easily exiting the network, e.g.
private data is being implemented in a way where Bluesky LLC can see
all your activity. The protocol changes often and with limited
community input.
This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and "our
users are okay with it". The community does pretty consistently attack
people who dissent (e.g. look at what happened when Mastodon leaders
objected). There's a lot of cheerleading for people who do opt into the
system, and there's really no incentive for informed criticisms.
It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a great
network for a number of specific subcultures who have a nice space away
from X, and I hope the team embraces that.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
The work to make the PLC not centralized has already begun
1. Non-profit (separate entity from Bluesky)
2. Moving to Switzerland (get the f' out of the US)
3. Consortium control (proof-of-authority)
A PLC read-only mirror implementation was released the last week.
I've been running one for a almost a year, redoing my hardware right
now, so it's currently down. There are others out there.
kevinak wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
This is still centralized.
verdverm wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
It's still good enough for most people
you don't have to like it, that's fine, you have Nostr as an
alternative
but when Nostr people come around bad mouthing everyone else,
especially with outdated and misleading claims, you make people
want to use Nostr less
davidgerard wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
Which specific claims are "outdated"?
Your answers have all been that it'll be solved in the fabulous
future. Quite possibly! But until it happens, it hasn't
happened.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
the work is currently happening, which I have mentioned in
other comments, since you indicated you have read them
prmoustache wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
At this point it sounds like a Duke Nukem Forever thing and
it will be funcional around 2038, and be totally obsolete
at this point.
davidgerard wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
it was "currently happening" in May 2023, but I look
forward to the working examples!
also, that's not a list of which specific claims are
"outdated"
theturtletalks wrote 1 day ago:
>> You can self-host a PDS. Almost nobody does.
Who would've thought true decentralization means everyone hosting their
own server? Yes, each user would have to pay and maintain it, but
that's the cost of decentralization. ATProto at least makes it easy to
jump ship if shit hits the fan and not have to start from scratch. Try
doing that with Twitter/Instagram/Etc.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
That portability issue was a direct answer to ActivityPub
I will give AP folks credit, they have looked at the success of
ATProto and found parts they also think are good ideas and are
bringing them back to AP.
I'm not sure if the same can be said about Nostr, I keep my distance
from that crowd. I wonder if this submission is reflective of the
larger Nostr community or if it's one person who wants to write a
put-down piece.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
There are specific steps Bluesky could take to decentralize the
network. These are going to sound extreme but I agree with the article
that it will never decentralize on its own. (Nothing will ever
decentralize on its own so this isn't a criticism of Bluesky
specifically.)
1. Strongly encourage backups.
2. Force users to migrate off the "official" PDS until it has less
than, say, 40% market share.
3. Make the mobile apps use third-party relay/appview by default (could
be randomized).
chickensong wrote 1 day ago:
> Strongly encourage backups
Or invert this, and make it local-first. It's your data, and
publishing it to a network is a form of backup. Either that, or the
client holds a local copy by default.
wmf wrote 1 day ago:
It's not clear to me what a local-first social network would mean.
The point is for other people to see your posts.
chickensong wrote 1 day ago:
The data is local-first, but it's designed so that you publish to
online networks. The point is to invert the current model of
putting your content into someone else's network and hoping for
the best, or expecting users to remember to run some manual
backup that's probably going to be a pain to do anything with.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
"That's the same argument people made about Twitter. 'If it goes bad,
we'll just leave.' We know how that played out."
Yeah, I left.
(And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
eviks wrote 1 day ago:
So it played very poorly, you lost personal data and most
importantly, social connections, and acquired a weariness
tacet wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
I think it depends on person.
The only social connection i lost is a person who lives on mastodon
now. The rest of people that matter to me are on bluesky now.
yellowapple wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
Whereas if Bluesky went evil tomorrow only the âacquired a
wearinessâ part would happen, given that it's straightforward to
move to a new PDS and take the entirety of your personal data and
social connections with it.
what wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
And the app view? You can take your data, can take everyone
elseâs that you follow?
yellowapple wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
The appviews are interchangeable; any appview will work with
any PDS. Whatever appviews my followers and followees end up
using, they'd still be able to see my posts, and I'd still be
able to see theirs.
qwertox wrote 1 day ago:
> If an acquirer disables exports, it doesn't matter that the tools
existed yesterday.
Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the cheapest
way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks to the EU (GDPR
Article 20)?
asadotzler wrote 1 day ago:
They can give it to you in the least useful way imaginable and will.
What we want and expect is an export that can be easily imported to
some other provider and that's where the "good guys" can
differentiate.
I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks, logins, etc.
and import into any other browser with almost no trouble at all. Try
to export your mainstream social network (facebook, twitter, insta,
tiktok, etc.) content and connections and import it into another
social network and let me know how that goes.
Spivak wrote 1 day ago:
Also, at best this says not to host your data on someone else's
computer and keep control of it, which is a thing Bluesky explicitly
supports and encourages.
Will normal people do it, no. But you can.
browningstreet wrote 1 day ago:
Bluesky isn't my bank records, isn't my photo archive, isn't my github,
isn't my Documents folder.
I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever.
Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the coffee
shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are 99K coffee
shops in the US. I can go to another one.
As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by despicable
beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough interesting people
that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee shop or a bar.
verdverm wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
I think it's important to separate Bluesky the company from atproto &
"the atmosphere", i.e the collection of apps, feeds, labellers,
relays, jetstreams, and other participants in the network.
The atmosphere and the PDS are definitely trending towards a single
database for all your things. All of the examples you cited are being
worked on in one form or another. I'm personally working towards a
Permissioned PDS which can power Google Workspace like experience on
ATProto, where there is an existing understanding of how sharing,
visibility, roles, and permissions work across groups of people
(IAM). Permissioned data unlocks an entire (majority) of applications
people want to use, but won't until they can do it without
broadcasting everything. There are a number of ways this may play
out, several will materialize as options, i.e. some apps need e2ee
and others cannot have it for the experience they want to deliver.
The overarching ethos is user or individual choice, paired with
credible exit, enables real competition. Let's go wild, build all new
apps, and let the people decide what they prefer. More indie, less
winner take all
dasil003 wrote 1 day ago:
This feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out of
social media entirely). I wish there wasnât this tension between
scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of tech were a
little less winner-takes-all. But such is the nature of global
digital distribution. Decentralization and local-first are nice
ideas but they create a pretty high barrier to entry that keeps a lot
of interesting people out. If Iâm going to be on social media I
donât want to be in a cesspool like Twitter but I also donât want
to be an idealogical hobbyist bubble.
verdverm wrote 19 hours 15 min ago:
> I wish the dynamics of...
This is totally what atproto offers, see my peer comment to yours,
then come back and read this.
I'll add here that there are a bunch of experiments going on which
aim to break down apps into features. One example is DMs. Ideally
all apps can use the same DM infrastructure (MLS based) and as a
users, my DMs are the same in any app as my dedicated messenger
app. Many people have had the idea to build a "browser" and any app
can use bits of another (leaflet blog publish creates bsky post).
Some cool experiments around things that look like web components,
where you can create records that express a way to render
something.
Another place user vs app choice comes into play is around the
graph itself. One of the early dreams of app builders was that
there is this existing network and you don't have to bootstrap a
social network from scratch. While this is partially true, it does
turn out reaching network effect is not so easy. Around this, there
is a multi-camp debate on whether apps should reuse social graphs
or not, one specific example of this is should an app
automatically, upon request, or not at all: start from a user's
existing social graph.
627467 wrote 1 day ago:
I dont get why you're downvoted.
Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is not
yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should be
disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be treated as
disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material things your
accumulate in life, why would you hoard random tweets, comments and
reactions forever?
If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way that
doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity, no?
"Switching costs" man... people move between countries with vastly
different languages and cultures and they adapt, make new
relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A to
database B that difficult really?
davidw wrote 1 day ago:
This is where I'm at, but it would be nice if it had some more
longevity to it, as there are costs to switching to the next thing
and the thing after that.
Retr0id wrote 1 day ago:
There doesn't seem to be a timestamp associated with this article, but
it is based on outdated information.
Retr0id wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
(For people reading this in the future, the blog has been redesigned
since my comment - I was commenting on this version: [1] )
HTML [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260220235943/https://kevinak.s...
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
How so?
I should add a time stamp to the blog.
AgentME wrote 1 day ago:
Bluesky is architected so you can export your data and follows and
followers to your own or someone else's infrastructure at any time.
There are some groups that have taken that offer and moved off of
Bluesky's infrastructure (see Blacksky). The fact that most people
aren't doing that is a sign that people are happy with how
Bluesky-the-company is running things. What's the issue?
zem wrote 1 day ago:
whether you agree or not, asking "what's the issue" misses the point
very badly, since the article is almost entirely about what the issue
is (i.e. that most people will not change defaults and the default is
to centralise on the bluesky servers)
AlienRobot wrote 1 day ago:
It's weird to focus on that when there isn't a single thing in
software that doesn't suffer from "everyone will just use the
default anyway"
zem wrote 1 day ago:
yeah I'm not saying the blog is right or wrong; I'm just saying
that describing bsky's features and asking "what's the issue?"
means you aren't engaging with what it's actually saying.
jmull wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm not the previous poster, but I donât see any cogent
points in the article to engage with in any depth.
verdverm wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
If you look at OP's comments here, I think the same sentiment
will come through. They do not seem interested in good faith
debate or discussion.
kevinak wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
I am, I just donât have the same values in terms of what
I want from my decentralized social media.
AgentME wrote 1 day ago:
The fact that the system is built around this escape hatch makes it
miles better than almost all other social networks. An escape hatch
doesn't need to be used by most people to be valuable.
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
Nostr doesnât have these issues
verdverm wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
Nostr has different issues, people are where their preference
for dealing with them is
pfraze wrote 1 day ago:
I know when Iâm using a Nostr app because its logo is an
endless spinner.
At the scales these systems run at, you need large indexes.
Distributing those indexes across many nodes would require a
breakthrough in federated queries, and if you have one of those
lying around Iâd pay good money for it.
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
Most people were happy with Twitter as well
newsoftheday wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
I generally liked Twitter before but not as much as now, since now
it's not so heavily trolled by far left activists.
Natfan wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
and yet all i see is far-right agritprop! its _almost_ like the
owner of the website has tweaked the algorithm for maximum
"engagement"?
verdverm wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Aren't most people over there trolling? Seems it starts at the
top and sets the tone for the whole site
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
That's a very strong statement to make.
AgentME wrote 1 day ago:
And Bluesky is better because you're not locked in and can export
your posts, follows, and followers off of their infrastructure if
they start being evil or you randomly feel like it. Companies like
Twitter effectively wield network effects to stop people from
leaving. All of one's activity on Twitter increases the sunk cost
to keep them on Twitter in a way that's not true for Bluesky.
fc417fc802 wrote 1 day ago:
I recognize that Bluesky is at present more open than Twitter and
that all of the necessary building blocks for the infra are
publicly available. That's good of course.
However I think the view you expressed there is misguided. If
Bluesky locked out third party infra tomorrow presumably the vast
majority of people would not move. Thus vendor lockin via network
effects remains. (Ie you are always free to leave but you'd be
moving from a metropolis to a backwater.)
The only scenario where this isn't true is one where no more than
a few percent of the people you interact with reside on any given
node. By that metric small AP nodes pass while large ones such as
the flagship Mastodon node fail. Similarly Gmail and Outlook fail
while any self hosted mail server passes.
It's not an easy problem to solve.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
There would be a revolt if Bluesky did that and doubt they will
be so self-destructive.
I'd rather be optimistic than nihilistic about it. It's still
early and there are a lot of good things happening.
what wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
How are they going to pay back all the VC money?
mh- wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have a horse in this race, but:
> [..] machine-readable archive of information associated with
your account in HTML and JSON files. [..] including your profile
information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your Moments, your
media ([..]), a list of your followers, a list of accounts that
you are following, your address book, Lists that youâve
created, are a member of or follow, [..], and more.
(Note that I actually elided some additional things that are
included in the export, for readability's sake.)
HTML [1]: https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-yo...
AgentME wrote 1 day ago:
You can't actually use your followers and following list from X
on other sites. With Bluesky, you can move your profile onto
other infrastructure, continue to see posts from people you
follow, and make new posts that your followers still see like
nothing happened. It's like how if you own your own domain
name, you can set your MX records to whatever email service you
want and change it when you want without affecting anyone
you're having email conversations with.
mh- wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, I see. Your use of the term "export" made me
misunderstand. Though now that I've thought about it for a
few minutes, I'm not sure what verb makes sense [to me]
there. I guess "migrate?"
edit: also, thanks for clarifying!
verdverm wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
yes, "pds migration" is a phrase you see more often
mcint wrote 1 day ago:
It's good FUD. You re-iterate their talking points. (Also, no CTA, no
takeaway, just "worry!")
As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful. We do
have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to use
interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC commitment, which
will at least have moderate legal costs if not a guarantee. It has
unequivocally set a new high bar.
They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The day may
come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but the turn has to
be pretty complete, because the data is pretty open. What's needed to
view it, use it at all, is pretty close to what's needed to host it.
"The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with other
apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps." Yeah, it's
possible. It's also possible they just close.
runako wrote 1 day ago:
When reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's
architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky" in
the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the author's
understanding of the space has major gaps.
(Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing
versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
snigsnog wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
[flagged]
knowtheory wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Anybody can sign up for Blacksky.
RandomNickname wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
And yet its full of black supremacy / afrocentrism.
And plenty of people people posting racist stuff about White and
Asian people.
It's no better than Twitter or 4chan at this point.
atherton94027 wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
I mean it's a repo with 1 very active contributor ( [1] ), I get that
they decided to skip on that
HTML [1]: https://github.com/blacksky-algorithms/rsky/graphs/contribut...
runako wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
(There are multiple repositories owned by that organization,
reachable by one click from OP's link.)
carb wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky
atherton94027 wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
Sorry I'm not sure I understand your point
carb wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
Sorry, meant say that Blacksky is much more important than the
metrics you point to, with more detail on that wiki.
They're the first alternative full stack, the first alternative
AppView, and that is something that the author should have
mentioned. However, it weakens the argument so they left it
out.
"Number of contributors" has never meant impact. You wouldn't
dismiss openssl or curl, ya know?
weare138 wrote 1 day ago:
But how is that 'decentralized' which was the entire point of Bluesky
and the AT protocol to begin with? We're just back to running
centralized services. Without decentralization this is just XMPP with
extra steps. You might as well just run something like Movim and save
yourself the hassle.
verdverm wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
> the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol
is really to find a good enough middle ground that has competitive
enough UX to get people off of the fully centralized, locked in
social media providers. In the broader context, ATProto to me means
user choice and provenance, which ATProto does better than any
other protocol. See all the parts beyond just data hosting, where
the entire distributed system is plug-n-play. [1] ATProto not being
purist, preferring pragmatism, is what attracts me over
alternatives like AP and Nostr.
HTML [1]: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
runako wrote 1 day ago:
There's "decentralized" in the sense that every device runs the
whole stack. In an analogy to another protocol, this would be like
running SMTP and IMAP on your phone and laptop.
Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that
govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is
how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their
own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that
people who are interested can do so and provide email service.
Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
Suppafly wrote 13 hours 14 min ago:
>Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
But why do we keep getting articles trying to convince us that it
needs to be the first kind?
kevinak wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Because centralization matters. It is what stops a hostile
agent from ruining things. There is no real win in being
"semi-decentralized".
api wrote 1 day ago:
Does it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will never use
it.
A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is.
Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless
there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has
to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against
future closing of the network. People donât like to buy insurance.
tpdly wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going
to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for
people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho,
BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a
chance of meeting users where there are with usable search,
realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing
event-busses.
People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is
that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do
social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty
great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.
The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity,
which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like
public libraries than ad tech.
snapetom wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
I agree 100%
Bluesky works because people are told "Go to Bluesky" and they
hide the federation. When you're told go to Mastodon and pick
mastodon.social or any of the hundreds of other servers, you've
lost. For some reason, the federation fans never understood
this. I remember an interview with Diaspora's developers and
they couldn't stop talking about how people can run their own
servers.
Dude.
I have two friends who left Twitter for Bluesky. One's an HR rep
and the other is a business analyst for warehouses. Does anyone
think a selling point for them was that they can run their own
Bluesky infrastructure?
verdverm wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
For some context
25G < PLC postgres < 100G, depending if you want to keep all the
spam operations (> 50%) and/or add extra indexes for a handle
autocomplete service (like me, takes it over 100GB with
everything)
Repo data (records) is in the double digit TB range (low end,
without any indexing, just raw)
Blobs are in the Petabyte range.
I aim to find out current and accurate details soon.
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
I know very well what it is, it doesnât change anything in the
grand scheme of things. I wish it did!
runako wrote 1 day ago:
Re-reading my reply, it is worded more harshly than I intended. My
apologies.
I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main
player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may
yet run into problems.
dangond wrote 1 day ago:
I might be misunderstanding something about atproto, but isn't it
always possible to export data from bluesky because all it takes is
reading your data, which is done by any app interacting with your pds
anyway? If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality
entirely, no?
verdverm wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Yes, there are backup services that can help so you cannot be locked
away from your data too.
8organicbits wrote 1 day ago:
> If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality
entirely, no?
Keep in mind, twitter got rid of their API. Google got rid of XMPP
federation. Bluesky breaking or defederating atproto wouldn't impact
most users, so they'd probably get less outcry than those examples.
HTML [1]: https://support.google.com/code/answer/55703?hl=en
davidw wrote 1 day ago:
Good points, but what's the alternative at this point?
Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting.
Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there.
Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's
mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists.
Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had
friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned
to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move
(like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.
moomoo11 wrote 1 day ago:
Go outside
manuelabeledo wrote 1 day ago:
Isn't Mastodon an alternative?
davidw wrote 1 day ago:
Not in terms of having a critical mass of users for many topics or
being very accessible for a lot of people.
manuelabeledo wrote 1 day ago:
I canât comment on the âcritical massâ, since I havenât
got the numbers. But what exactly does âaccessibilityâ mean
in this context? What are the challenges of opening an account in
mastodon.social?
chipotle_coyote wrote 17 hours 31 min ago:
It's the same challenge as picking an email server, which is
why no one does that.
...
Seriously, joining Mastodon is not particularly difficult;
people just freaked out a few years ago at being asked to pick
a server to join. The joinmastodon.org website has gotten a lot
better at explaining what that means and just directing people
to mastodon.social if they don't want to pick something more
specific, but the "oooh, this extra step makes Mastodon super
super scary, if you pick wrong YOU ARE DAMNED FOREVERRRRRRRR"
vibe persists.
verdverm wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
The first challenge most people have when starting AP /
Mastodon is that they are presented with a choice "pick a
server" before anything else. That's what I hear most often
anyway.
The other challenge that AP has as an ecosystem is that they
have been hostile to anyone wanting to build an index or
business. People need to eat and they turned off a lot of
developers who'd love to make their living building social
media tech outside of the corporate oligarchy.
ATProto welcomes all, even if there is the occasional drama or
hostility.
loeg wrote 1 day ago:
If you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a dead
end.
davidw wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it is
not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things I'm
interested in to make it worthwhile.
prmoustache wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
But mastodon too in my case so I guess it is just a totally
subjective YMMV thing.
kevinak wrote 1 day ago:
Nostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.
davidgerard wrote 20 hours 37 min ago:
Last I looked its how to sign on page said "first create a
keypair". That's certainly a good way to avoid the problems of
success ...
davidw wrote 1 day ago:
But does it have a critical mass of people?
The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with
cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."
That's not my crowd.
irusensei wrote 1 day ago:
I hear you but if you think about it who else has an incentive
and skills to create something like Nostr? Who are the people
interested in free speech, signatures and decentralization and
with the skills to pull it up?
And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the
crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing
everything.
From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are
posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can
be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is
no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a
link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show.
Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a
power tripping administrator.
It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user
content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents
someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk
about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed
content focused relays in Nostr.
verdverm wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
> Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of
a power tripping administrator.
But you are right back to the same UX issue that prevented
crypto mass adoption, i.e. lose your keys, lose everything
Very few want to own that risk.
prmoustache wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
> Very few want to own that risk.
But they are all willing to own the risk of getting their
hotmail/google/apple/meta account being disabled on a whim
without explanation.
PaulHoule wrote 1 day ago:
[1] which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or
LinkedIn or wherever.
HTML [1]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
seandoe wrote 1 day ago:
That's just not practical for most people (the publishing part).
And in relation to microblogging, are you going to publish every
140-character, out-of-context thought on your personal website?
8organicbits wrote 1 day ago:
There's other syndication models, although POSSE gets talked
about most.
If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not
practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from
being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media
sites.
HTML [1]: https://indieweb.org/PESETAS
verdverm wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
There's an ATProto project the main blog sites are working
together on around distribution and syndication. It also has
places for the off-protocol sites people post or publish.
HTML [1]: https://standard.site/
seandoe wrote 1 day ago:
And the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky or
whatever and the content is replicated to your pds.
I recognize the minor difference, but if you have the energy
and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across silos, surely you
can setup a pds elsewhere.
8organicbits wrote 1 day ago:
I think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single
protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using
automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook,
Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you
otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the network
effect as you have followers on other platforms already.
People can still find you and your content isn't lost.
Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban
accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky
PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.
seandoe wrote 1 day ago:
Ok yea that makes sense.
DIR <- back to front page