hckrnws

>“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.

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.

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.

Yep. I've had that conversation more than once. They get very suspicious! And probably triggers internal meetings with cyber.

I can only dream that it triggers meetings with security.

I once started receiving spam addressed to <mybankname>@<mydomain>.org and after several instances I reported it to MyBankName.

I explained that I only used that address in my dealings with them and so it must have leaked from them.

They said that's not how email works, you have one address that you use with all your contacts. One of them must have leaked it.

I tried to explain that I used a different host portion with each company I contacted.

They said that's not how email works, you have one address that you use with all your contacts. One of them must have leaked it.

I transferred my balance out and let the account lapse.

why didn't you close the account instead, after transferring your balance, to send them a stronger message?

Sounds like the sort of bank that only allow closure to be requested via fax certain months.

The mailbox is publicly accessible, in the 2nd level basement behind a locked door guarded by a hungry tiger!

Then I request, in no uncertain terms, that the government kindly close those sorts of faxers.

I genuinely wonder how many emails I've missed because some system flagged the email address as invalid or suspicious.

Since this happens often, you could try changing the form of the email addresses to make them less confusing. I can think of several options:

1. Prepend "from-", so that instead of <their-business>@example.com you give them from-<their-business>@example.com. It should at least make it easier to explain your approach when you have to.

2. ROT13 or reverse the name of the business so it's gurve-ohfvarff@example.com or ssenisub-rieht@example.com. You can design a different stateless function that maps names to email addresses. The function doesn't even have to be invertible. This is similar to a stateless password manager like https://www.lesspass.com/.

3. Use a list of pre-generated addresses you keep on your person. Think recovery codes. Of course, you can keep the list on a smartphone.

Even giving them "email+their-business@gmail.com" (instead of email@gmail.com), as every single Gmail user is able to do, will no doubt sow confusion.

I always allocate an email of my+company@myemail.com and the number of email validators that don't accept that "+" is a legit email character is infuriating.

That's why I've updated my SMTP config to handle - the same way as + 10+ years ago. And to avoid "why is my business name in your email?" questions, I rot13 it.

Your first sentence took me a second to mentally parse and understand, so to help anyone with that same issue later, what was meant is:

> That's why I've updated my SMTP config to handle the hyphen character the same way as the plus sign over 10 years ago.

>rot13

That's clever. But doesn't it cause friction when trying to relay the address e.g. over the phone?

Yeah, did the same for my SMTP config way back. Don't think my family users have managed to get their head around it yet though.

> to avoid "why is my business name in your email?" questions, I rot13 it.

That's a neat idea.

Yeah, I do this with a catchall domain as well. Indeed, I've had people ask if I work for their company -- too funny! So far the only company that has illegally added me to a mailing list I didn't sign up for is H&M (the clothing store).

I hate this stuff. Someone tried to sign up to a crypto exchange with my phone number. :| 3 times they had the code resent!

This is simultaneously a brilliant idea and hilarious because I can imagine how this must confuse them.

I do the same, and some companies flat-out refuse to accept email adresses with their own name in them. Samsung, notably, won't allow samsung@domain.tld for some obscure reason.

Every time I have to hand out my email over the phone, I brace for having to explain my catch-all to people. Depending on how tired/tech-illiterate the person on the other end sounds, I've started using plausible-sounding alternatives (contact@/hello@/email@) instead.

> won't allow samsung@domain.tld for some obscure reason.

It's not obscure. Some code monkey at Samsung was told to filter out certain addresses, Samsung ones among them, and just used a regex or substring search on the entire address.

It could also fall foul of a Scunthorpe filter - refusing to accept names with some subset of characters, and the company name got added to the filter to avoid "samsungsuxbawls@gmail.com" or similar

> 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.

> 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?

At least 6 with my not-that-common (maybe somewhere in the middle) first and last name combination.

Maybe more, but at least six of the emails meant for others that I've received, implied they live at those six unique locations.

I know one of them likes to get the vegetarian meal option when traveling internationally by plane.

(Companies should really validate email address OWNERSHIP before spamming innocent people.)

> (Companies should really validate email address OWNERSHIP before spamming innocent people.)

I don't understand why this isn't part of the normal flow for implementing Verify Your Email emails.

Someone used my firstname.lastname Gmail address on trip dot com a couple of days ago to book flights, and their Verify Your Email email actually had a Not My Email-type link in it... which apparently does nothing, as I shouldn't know that if you phone trip dot com about changing your flights, they send you an email with a Change Flight link.

I just got off a chat with their support, so hopefully my fat-fingered doppelganger doesn't miss their flights from Atlanta to Sydney tomorrow.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen an email verification flow that works in reverse, where the email owner sends the email instead. Seems it would be easy enough to say "Send an email from your indicated account with <pin> to <corporate email address>." I'm assuming the flow is different enough that it would lead to losing people who decide not to follow through but who would have continued with the 'normal' setup. It would also train users to send their MFA pins to others which would be a net negative for anyone using the normal verification process.

Are you sure they were confused people? More probable explanation is that they made typos while entering their email.

The alternative explanation, that they roitinely use [your name].[your last name]@gmail.com as their email, and don't realize that it never works is... unlikely IMO.

One of the emails had a phone number for the intended recipient, so I called. It was an old person who was definitely confused.

I can easily imagine there are a bunch of older people who do not have email addresses, yet just about everything requires an email address, even if it's not necessary for whatever service, so people have to either make up an address, or incorrectly remember what the address was that their children or grandchildren set up for them.

Either way, that doesn't excuse the companies that spam innocent people.

My wife has been receiving medical appointments, test results, event tickets, package tracking numbers and so on destined to a few old ladies for years. I once tracked the sons and nephews of one and told them, and they apparently thought I was some kind of scammer and didn't return messages after a couple exchanges, so to this day she still receives all those.

If the email they were trying to reach was [firstname].[middle initial].[lastname] and they forgot the middle initial that would explain why it's showing up in your inbox.

Several years ago, I started getting mass amounts of signups to one of my gmail accounts by the same person (thanks to some of these, I found out her first and last name). Some months after it started, I realized she also had the twitter account with that same name. I don't think she knew gmail and twitter were different things.

You are probably being cheeky, but just in case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom

https://hinative.com/questions/18367967

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

This solves only half of the problem (migration). It doesn't solve the problem of different people signing up on different servers using the same handle. Is there anything stopping me from making a stephenking account on another server?

My "nitpick" was on the use of the word "server". The domain name used for a username is decoupled from the server. But no, there is nothing stopping you from making a stephenking subdomain on another domain. Just like there is nothing stopping you from making a website at google.mycoolwebsite.xyz.

But there are moderation lists that you as a user can subscribe to. It wouldn't be hard to find a moderation list for impersonators, which would solve this problem for you.

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.

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.

I think this is why this is in truth, an aesthetic choice masquerading as a conversation about technical implementation.

I think there's no two ways around it, @stephenking.bsky.social looks better than @stephenking@mastodon.social.

Blue Sky does the names better and opts people into a default server at the moment, and I would say their desktop and mobile experience is a bit better, and that feels like they've solved something specific and technical even though, as you pointed out, the issue with domains is the same in each case.

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.

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.

Most people stop at step two and wait around for someone to do it for them.

Stores won't let you have cash-back from your purchase when using your debit card if you flash the card. You have to insert the card. Some cashiers don't even know that. I don't feel enlightened by that fact. Newer cars won't disengage the hand-break if parked on a slope and you don't have the seat locked in. I don't feel enlightened by that fact. The list of "rules" goes on and on and technology feels oppressive, not empowering. Maybe is artificial enlightenment?

Sorry for the rant.

Right, and this is all you need to point out to burst anyone's bubble who insists on behalf of "the people" that it's all too hard.

It just goes in circles with personal anecdotes that always coincidentally corroborate whatever position someone was already arguing for anyway. What would be really interesting to see is someone making the case against Mastodon but acknowledging that "people I know" weren't confused by it or vice versa.

But when they are faced with two options, one of which is confusing and requires figuring out, and another one that does not, with the first having no clear advantages over the second, why would they bother spending time figuring it out?

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?

Personal anecdotes. It's always personal anecdotes that coincidentally corroborate whatever position someone was already arguing for. As I noted elsewhere, it would be a lot easier to take these seriously if they weren't so on the nose, and if they instead took the form of "well it seems they have account migration figured out BUT instances are confusing BUT the sign up process is streamlined BUT it's not easy to explain to people..."

It would be clear we were at least talking about things where "the people" had reactions to specific things for specific reasons that were in principle solveable and not merely ghosted into existence to support a point the commenter wanted to make anyway.

I think people see one another doing it and kind of collectively converge on this ritual of collective storytelling where we offer anecdotes that don't offer any kind of truth tracking accountability.

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

It's not a hard concept, but it is a stupid one. Phone numbers for example you can take with you when you switch providers. Email has the provider hardcoded into your email address, thus every new provider means you have a new email.

The Web still lacks a first-class concept of a user identify that you can take with you across servers.

Phone numbers only work that way due to laws requiring number portability. Otherwise the provider is encoded in the number range.

It's funny you mention that because for a while the supposed deal breaker with Mastodon was the inability to migrate accounts (even though no other service let you do that).

But now you can, so we're on to the next whack-a-mole.

But if you own your own domain and use it for your own mail, you do take your identity with you? Isn't this what AT protocol is promising with Bluesky's identity system?

People being confused by a concept is the definition of it being hard.

Anglophones are often confused by the concept of tone being used to differentiate words in many non-European languages.

But it's not a hard concept, it's just unfamiliar to them.

People being confused by a concept after it has been taught to them suggests that either the concept is hard or the educational process inadequate. Confusion on initial introduction has nothing to do with difficulty.

No, it can just be because they haven't been exposed to it or needed to care about it. Obviously people's real names have similar problems and nobody is confused that John Smith isn't the same person as John Jones.

Therefore it's a bad concept.

are all hard to understand concepts bad concepts?

are hard concepts from math and science bad concepts? should we discard calculus?

is potty training a toddler a bad concept? they initially struggle with it and some find it hard

is a healthy diet a bad concept? people without prior knowledge of what's healthy and what isn't are likely to struggle

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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

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!

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...

"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.

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.

> You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality.

The only person making any kind of assumption is actually you, by imagining that something is not possible or plausible because you project your personal expectations based on a personal notion of morality onto everyone.

If you take a step back and look at the scenario, you'll understand that nothing binds any third party to comply with your personal expectations, or follow your particular argument based on morality. Therefore your expectations are completely unfounded.

If you take a look at reality you'll find plenty of examples where projects which were previously open were afterwards closed and monetized. This is nothing new. Just take a look at, say, Reddit. Or even Twitter. Countless examples.

If you take a step back and look at your comment, you might realise that you are making the same point: businesses don't have to take any particular path...

The people who work at companies are usually not devoid of morality. Even the people who own the companies, the people on the board, the people who are the executives, are not usually devoid of morality. But insofar as the company is an organization of people rather than a person itself, it is devoid of morality. Organizations of people are not people, they are meta-organisms that have different ways of "thinking" and operating than the individual humans they are comprised of. Don't anthropomorphize these things, they aren't capable of morality in the same way that a bear isn't. If ever it behaves in a way that seems moral, that's not because it actually is.

The more people who are involved in the decision making apparatus of an organization, not just at the top but throughout the entire net, the less human you know it is. If the entire company consists of a single person, it is a person and not an organization. But if a company consists merely of one owner/operator with one employee below them that tells the other things and is told things, the product of those two becomes less than human and may make decisions that neither of the two humans would approve of if they had the complete picture of what was going on. The larger the organization grows, the worse this problem becomes.

This isn't only true of companies, but any group of people. Groups of people are not themselves people.

Far more often than not, businesses have compromised on their principles until there was nothing left of them. The exceptions prove the rule. Perhaps people have principles, but they rarely apply them at work, and if so they are swiftly replaced by more pliable employees.

agree with what you wrote but the problem becomes more complicated when API access becomes expensive to provide. basically it’s easy to provide something for free when no one is using it and no one is making any money. but when things start picking up then the real problems arise.

A for-profit business might be run by people who do care about ethics at any particular point, but one thing that we've learned over time is that there's absolutely no guarantee that those people will still be around tomorrow.

> This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century

What does this mean. What does Keynes have to do with moral companies? Is it made up?

Well, it's a pretty good null hypothesis.

And both people and boards can change for the worse.

Facebook and IG allowed 3rd party apps, until they went public. Twitter and Reddit did as well up to a couple of years ago, now they don't. I'll look to the real history of 21st century Silicon Valley companies over the theories of a dead academic from the Great Depression.

> 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.

This is an extremely unpopular take in today’s world where 99% of what you use is expected to be “free” and subsidized by those with interests thoroughly misaligned with yours.

Nevertheless, it is my strong opinion that offering paid service is the only way to a healthy ecosystem, healthy competition, products that actually benefit the user, and the market that works as the market is supposed to (and that Big Social innovating[0] the subversion of this model is a tradegy with net negative effects on society).

Not offering paid[1] service to customers means ultimately either 1) dying or 2) making someone else your paying customer (e.g., the advertisers being offered the users as the product).[2] That “someone else”, by being the source of revenue, will dictate how the service evolves, and their interests will not be aligned with the users’ except by sheer accident.

In case of services like Bluesky, I doubt API access can be excluded from the equation, since it costs money, and when inevitably abused a lot of it, sadly.

Federation overhead could in theory be subsidized by paying customers, or there could be smart controls such as letting certain servers federate for free if it benefits paying users while charging others an honest fee[3].

Finally, let’s not forget the good old “charge for the app”. Sure, being open means someone can build another, cheaper app, and someone will use it, but believe it or not—that’s normal competition; make your app better, respect your users, turn profit.

Bluesky’s accepting large investment is a signal of not going in this direction, and is therefore worrying.

[0] It could be said that some companies (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft) did something like that earlier, subverting the market via offering a product for free by not seriously chasing pirates. When someone’s choice is between two paid products—instead of free awesome product everyone pirates vs. some mediocre paid product—the competition works much better. However, their core offers were still paid, and crucially those were not social media services that prey on our attention and anxiety.

[1] Before someone mentions the disadvantaged: offering subsidized options to those who need it is not mutually exclusive with a straightforward commercial model.

[2] There’s also 3) becoming another Wikipedia, which happens every so often… Let’s be realistic.

[3] A lot of courage would be required, as I can already hear the “walled garden” outcries.

Very well said. This is the approach we're taking with peergos, paid accounts unless you self host. I wrote some of our thoughts on this here:

https://peergos.org/posts/the-social-dilemma

1. I am not sure it is possible to compete with a free product. By definition it will have more users. That’s the tragedy, competition is not possible.

2. My approach is not “one more product will be the answer”, more like “fixing the incentives and making the market work will enable many products”.

1. It depends on the time scale. The question is if you can outlive their VC funding.

2. How do you fix the incentives short of fixing capitalism to remove software VCs?

1. They are supported by paying customers (the advertisers), not just VC money.

2. You don’t need to get rid of VCs, it’s orthogonal.

Just make interoperation/complete API coverage required by law to be available to any user if you have more users than certain amount. It would neuter the lock-in when anyone can make a third-party GUI that has no ads and interoperates with any other social platform (meaning no “all my friends are there” effect).

Yes, legally requiring open APIs and interop beyond X users is the best way forward. There is some tension with allowing product changes and deprecating old APIs though. Maybe something like mandate versioned APIs, and keep old versions around for at least 2 years after newer version is released.

I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.

You're misunderstanding why it gets mocked.

Twitter launched a paid tier, Twitter Blue, before the Musk takeover. It was a sensible move, offering additional features such as edit functionality for power users, but not harming the experience for those who chose not to buy into it.

Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts. In fact, there was as far as I know no visual indication that someone was a Twitter Blue user.

When Musk took over, one of his first changes was to combine Twitter Blue and the verified programme, removing any actual verification in favour of a claim that anyone who had paid was 'verified'. The company also artificially boosts the posts of those who have bought this new premium tier, which disadvantages everyone else.

Buying a blue tick is seen, quite rightly now, as buying an artificial boosting via the algorithm and that's just pure vanity.

> Most importantly, it was entirely separate to the use of blue ticks to denote verified and authentic accounts

Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." They were handed out randomly to some celebrities. bigcorps, and friends of Twitter employees. As far as I know a bluecheck was never handed out to anyone who wasn't who they said they were (although you could get them under pseudonyms too), but the "wrong" celebrities or normal people could not get them. It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity.

That’s false. The programme was explicitly launched to highlight accounts that Twitter the company had verified as actually representing the person. [0]

It was launched after the company was sued by a sports star who was impersonated. Until Musk took over it could always be relied on as proof of an account’s authenticity.

What you’re complaining about isn’t that it represented something else, but that as with any large scale verification process it doesn’t scale well and the process was opaque.

Twitter cycled through various approaches to solve the problem. At first they merely reached out to people, based on the popularity of accounts representing them, their level of fame, and their risk of impersonation (or evidence of prior impersonation) and as and when the team had capacity. Therefore celebrities, politicians, and journalists were prioritised. However, this was a flawed process that was too US-centric and too US West Coast-centric on top of that.

They later opened up public applications but closed it down when they were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t process them all. They ran into all the usual verification challenges, including language differences and the difficulty of verifying across countries. So they reverted back to the previous model while working on a way to use external factors to allow for a scaled up verification process in the future. That process stopped when Musk bought them.

The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks. The company even verified Jason Kessler, though that stirred up a public controversy that forced it to pause the programme for a bit. [1]

It wasn’t a perfect programme of course, but it did what it said it would: If you saw that an account had a blue tick you could trust it meant it was an authentic account that Twitter had verified. That aspect of the system never failed.

[0] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-verified-accounts-2 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/technology/jason-kessler-...

Yes, bluechecks were who they said they were. But just because you were who you said you were did not mean you could get a bluecheck.

Bluecheck -> authentic. Authentic !> bluecheck.

There was no path for most people almost all of the time to get a bluecheck, and they could be removed for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with your identity. The "process" consisted of someone at Twitter deciding you were worthy, based on arbitrary criteria including "you're my friend."

> The claim that it was only handed out to people for social cachet doesn’t hold water. For one, Republican politicians, Fox News and other conservative publication journalists, and sufficiently notable right-leaning celebrities all had blue ticks.

Having bad politics doesn't mean one doesn't have social cachet. You yourself say here "notable" - but again, just being notable was not enough, though it was a big help. And of course, if you had the right friends, you could be completely non-notable.

Your post begins with "that's false", but the rest of it agrees with what I said.

In many old Twitter circles, having a bluecheck made you an object of derision for precisely these reasons - it didn't signify authenticity, it was a social marker that frequently came with inane tweets and thin skin that was perceived to arise due to an idea they thought they were "elite."

Your post said Blue ticks had nothing to do with being "verified" or "authentic." and It was a mark of social cachet, not authenticity..

That is clearly false. The blue check was an accurate signal of authenticity through verification by Twitter. What it was not was a universal verification mechanism that scaled to being able to verify everyone who used the platform. Those are two different things, and the lack of universality does not mean that the programme was not useful in valuable in providing a means to prove authenticity and avoid impersonation of the many people it did cover.

Moreover, the company was actively working on ways to scale it up into being able to reliably verify many more people before Musk bought it.

Now all that is gone, and a blue check means nothing to other users of the platform other than as a sign that the holder is paying for premium features. It's no longer a trustworthy verification mechanism.

And yet somehow, impersonation is no more a problem on X than it was on Twitter.

The fact is nobody paid attention to the blue check except the people who had one. The outcry was because a set of people felt elite because of their blue checks and were upset that anyone could get one. Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump or Kanye West impersonators are not an issue on the platform.

There have already been high profile impersonations, one of which caused a company’s stock to dive. Another was the infamous situation where Musk freaked out over people impersonating him.

The only reason it’s not worse is because of inertia and the fact that most public figures are still using the accounts they had when verification was in place. That won’t last. It’s also why public figures who are leaving for other platforms usually opt to keep their X accounts in place but dormant.

Kanye was in fact impersonated on Twitter in the past, it was one of the key reasons behind the introduction of Verified Accounts.[0]

I have also seen impersonators for all three of those you mentioned, especially in terms of crypto bots for Trump. However those are also three of the most heavily policed and watched profiles by the company’s understaffed moderating team, who proactively monitor for impersonations. That’s not true for lesser public figures: I just searched for a hand full of well-known journalists and found several impersonation profiles for them all.

What’s worse, their impersonation reporting function does not let you report the impersonation of someone who is not an active user. I know another public figure who doesn’t have an account there, doesn’t want one, but now hasn’t been able to get them to do anything about an impersonator who is using his name to scam others.

The current model is badly broken and decidedly worse than the verification system that existed before.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...

What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick.

It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed.

X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt.

Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"

> "...other useful things, but they didnt"

But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.

The blue tick doesn't cause the reply boost. The paid plan level does, from small to large boost. Blue tick means you supplied a valid phone and credit card - a strong indicator of a genuine account.

I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links.

On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid.

Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features:

https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji

It's interesting to me that you consider servicing API requests to not be a service.

Of course they're a service, but a lot of people started calling Musk evil when he started charging for them, so now we (who love bluesky) have to pretend like they're not an online service but have somehow become a moral obligation.

Why is ability to post a service but ability to see what everyone posts not a service? I would think its the other way around, users are providing value, let them do it for free, you find the content valuable and want a firehouse to see what everyone is saying, you should pay.

> But the API access and federation should remain free.

...no.

APIs are not free cost-wise: They require server compute to serve requests, at minimum.

IMO: Require API users to put down $2 to obtain access, and offer higher tiers for higher limits. I.E What Twitter's API already does.

> 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.

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 ?

Parts of it certainly were. I built a somewhat widely deployed feed widget back in ~2009/2010 that worked via JSON-P and public access.

I assume this is all ancient history now and a distant memory to most, but there was an era where Twitter’s API was a ton of fun to work with.

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

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.

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.

this is really cool! thanks for sharing :)

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.

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...

"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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

Well, yes. Bluesky offers something close to the look and feel and, crucially, community of pre-ruined twitter, plus some new community moderation tools. Realistically 99% of its users don't care about and arguably don't even want decentralization.

Right, they want the fruits of it. They just don't want the sustainable agriculture.

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).

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).

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?

It's a better situation than Mastadon because you can keep your handle. On Mastadon when you change servers you get a new handle since they are tied together.

Yes and no. If you follow the Mastodon migration process, your old handle(s) forward to your new one(s).

What you lose (at least last I checked) are action notifications based on your forwarded handle(s). This mostly doesn't matter, though in my case I have one mildly-viral toot which occasionally gets rediscovered. Missing out on the notifications storm there is mostly feature rather than bug.

For the curious: <https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102376653178100454>

Yes you can change your PDS without losing anything.

You won't lose your existing followers? They will still be able to see your new and old posts from your new host? Even if Bluesky suspends your account?

If that is true then that probably goes a long way in addressing the concern Doctrow and others have with Bluesky.

edit: According to one article[1] PDS isn't really full federation like what mastodon has. Right now you can only host your own account in your PDS (But they plan to gradually increase that limit to 10, and then more later)[2]. But it's certainly a good start. Not sure if Bluesky will have the capability to block you from reaching your own followers though (say if they ban or suspend your account).

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24062837/bluesky-drops-inv...

[2] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation

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

[flagged]

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.

[dead]

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.

>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-...

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

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.

An inevitability, unfortunately.

Yes, it probably will. If it does then I will move to a new platform.

I'm sorry, but there's just a qualitative difference between a company setting up some API endpoints and what Bluesky PBC is doing with building atproto, releasing PDS software, encouraging self-hosters and treating them as first class, etc.

You may be interested in this thread from a core dev which examines this exact play by Reddit (and how nobody could do anything about it), how it would have been different on atproto, and how a robust ecosystem keeps incumbent players honest: https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.xyz/post/3la636r666c2p

I'll refer to Cory Doctorow's excellently-written takedown[1] of this idea. Bluesky has plans to make it technically shit-proof, but haven't executed those plans "yet". Until that's the case, they're just as susceptible as any other content platform. After all, they haven't even revealed how they will make a profit yet. And they will have to do that. Profit motive always wins, exponentially so when something is venture-backed. To quote Public Enemy: "can't truss it"

[1]https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-fail...

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Ah, the circle of life for VC-funded social media... Let third party devs write cool apps, copy the features that stick, then pull their rug. Then proceed to squeeze ad revenue in a death spiral as the MAU gently falls off.

Who remembers App.net, after the first time Twitter tried banning third-party clients back in like 2012?

They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.

Could have said that at one point about Twitter or Reddit.

Do you not understand fiduciary responsibility? If they can charge and make more money they are effectively obligated to. They would need to sell their investors against the plan that everyone uses AND propose a plan that will make more money.

Reddit went through this around their IPO.

That’s not how fiduciary responsibility works. It’s very easy to say, “we’re not going to do X because we don’t think it’s a good long term investment due to brand destruction”. This happens all of the time. It’s a complete myth that they are responsible to force short term charges for short term revenue.

What you’re confusing it with is shareholder pressure, which is orthogonal to duty. What Reddit went through was just kowtowing to large potential investors to increase IPO demand.

Do you not understand PBLLC? Also https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

Blue Sky hasn't done an IPO.

I have never seen a more obviously telegraphed plan.

Twitter managed without banning alternative clients for 16 years, right up until the advent of Naughty Old Mr Car.

(They did vaguely try once, but there was such a backlash that they backed off.)

They did not manage, they made losses every single quarter but one.

Not sure where you got that one; they were net profitable for two full years at least. They were generally FCF-positive, and could have reached paper profitability fairly easily at the cost of reducing spending (though their shareholders likely wouldn’t have liked that; the markets like to see smallish tech companies spending what they take in, not paying a dividend, as a general rule).

Twitter was not a massively lucrative company, but the idea that it was financially near death is a myth.

Twitter didn't wait for Musk to attack alternative clients, or charging for API access. Pretty sure that's why it took him all of 5 minutes to flip the switch and turn everything completely off.

----

https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/16/3248079/twitter-limits-ap...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/16/17699626/twitter-third-pa...

> We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps.

https://www.androidauthority.com/heres-whats-really-happenin...

> To save you a click, the social network wants to charge up to $2899.99 per month for developers to use this new API on up to 250 users. Of course, that’s untenable. The developers don’t want to pay it and, frankly, neither do their users, us, you, or any other sane person. Additionally, a good third party Twitter app will clearly have more than 250 users. However, as Luke explains, this new API is never (and was never) for third party apps.

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.

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.

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.

Agreed--twitter interactions with famous people are absolutely a superstimulus in the same way ice cream or Factorio are; unless you're following some kind of rigorous strategy to promote a product or service.

But, indulging (in moderation) in ice cream or Factorio is one of the great things about living in the modern era. Just don't let it rewire your dopamine receptors too far to enjoy the real stuff!

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.

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.

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.

> 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

I meant, like, Joyce Carol Oates; who I had mentally placed in the same "historic personage" category as Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter before learning she had a twitter account.

And, yeah, it's somewhat toxic to engage in idolatry; yeah, I would more profitably spend my time trying to become a research director or founder myself. Having John Carmack like my Arxiv recommendation isn't an achievement, the way inventing the fast inverse square root algorithm is. But it sure does feel nice!

No one is making you care what Stephen King has to say. You don't need to idolise someone just to be interested in things they might say

You're here in the comments of Hacker News so you clearly are interested in social networks. You reguarly check in here to see popular links others have shared, and occasionally participate in conversations. It's seems pretty easy to understand that others might be interested in a slightly different UI on top of this.

> who gives a shit about famous people?

Lots of people. That's why they're famous. You may not, but many do, and that's okay.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think Twitter was required for someone with a rather good track record/cv like yours to get good jobs.

Thank you for the kind words, but even good CVs get lost in the great recruitment filter all the time. It's great to have a platform where you can interact directly with real engineers at various companies.

Not required, but it could present opportunities.

> 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.

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?

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

I consider HN a doom scrolling machine as well

Hackernews is just as much of an echo chamber as any other social media, dinner mistake it matching you're biases as it not having any

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.

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

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

> Reddit

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

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

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

Some people think it’s fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm an exemplar of the person you describe above. I started my blog on Typepad in 2004 and am in year 21, with things pretty much as they were in the beginning. When/if Typepad collapses (there are those who say it already has, since they stopped adding new customers in 2020 after being sold and posting is VERY janky and broken since then), I'll find a new home under the same brand name.

Back in the day, around 2010-2012, I averaged 15,000 page views and 10,000 visitors/day. In recent years it's been around 500 page views/day, so about 3% of where I was at maximum blog.

The nice thing about being this marginal is that I can easily respond to each comment/email.

>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.

Network effects are real huh? Geez, who knew?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

(hint: not that decentralized after all)

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/

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

>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.

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.

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...

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

They banned Laura Looner for just showing up.

I don't know how reliable a source daily dot is, but [their report](https://www.dailydot.com/debug/bluesky-ban-laura-loomer-catt...) says that is untrue.

That Dailydot article is from November 14 2024 and says those were fake accounts.

But apparently she really did create an account, yesterday, and says to have been immediately banned, without posting anything: https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1873542021715243076

I see. Having looked into this some more, I honestly think she's an outlier. I'm not familiar with her work, but she seems to make money by being banned from places, using the "most banned woman" label as a badge of honour. Still, would be interesting to get Bluesky's take on this, and some more unbiased detail from somewhere.

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.

That first one looks like a first-person account, so I'm guessing is probably heavily biased; I couldn't watch the full video without creating an account, which I'm not prepared to do right now.

The second is clearly an account attempting to get banned. Regardless of what you post, if you're actively trying to get banned, I don't care that much when you do.

The third is probably the most concerning, although he doesn't provide any specific evidence about what he actually posted, so must be taken with a grain of salt.

In general, I'm really against services banning you without clear reason or ability to challenge. See also gmail, X, amazon, etc. etc. In terms of "free speech" vs. "censorship", I'd like a healthy mix for my social media service of choice (whether that ends up being Bluesky or something else). I don't want people to be excluded simply for expressing an opinion. I do want people excluded if they are harassing others—or worse, obviously.

Nothing concrete in any of those links, but they all smack of bad faith (and the middle one didn’t even depict a ban).

That said, if people whose entire personality is being anti-trans perceive Bluesky as ban-happy and aren’t interested in it, I see that as a win.

> they all smack of bad faith

> That said, if people whose entire personality is being anti-trans

Are you talking about protecting women’s rights? That’s pro something, not anti something, right?

So speaking of bad faith… The only one I see acting in bad faith here is you?

No, I’m not talking about protecting women’s rights. I hope if you were to imagine (in good faith!) a person “whose entire personality is protecting women’s rights” and a person “whose entire personality is being anti-trans” you’d come up with different images.

Btw, you’re firmly doing the bad faith thing now, and were from the very start when you danced around the truth with language like “commonly held views and scientific facts”.

It's both. To be pro-women is to be anti-trans, and vice versa. The two stances are fundamentally incompatible.

You see it as a problem, i see it as a benefit, Main reason i dislike twitter/X is the amount of pointless grift that goes around, some for monetary reasons, Either behave like a human or leave, "I posted some dog whistle and got banned for it" is actually a great ad for Bluesky.

I've never been able to find it again, but there was a really interesting discussion on [ATP](https://atp.fm/) a long while back where John Siracusa was floating the idea of a 'less free' social network and I've really, really wanted one ever since. Honestly, Hacker News is pretty close to that in the sense that low-value content is unceremoniously removed, which must contribute to the overall better quality here.

The problem I see today, is that we, humans, can't find a balance in that for some reason. Less free basically translates to the moderated, and it is universally seen as a good mechanism in general. But today it is often either free for all lack of moderation, or a full scale ban frenzy, with zero warnings, and zero timed bans, always permanent ones. Sometimes due to the platform architecture permabans even prevent from reading posts. And out of the few places with warning systems, several have no control over report abuse. There are almost no middle ground popular platforms left.

> “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.

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.

>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.

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.

It looks like bluesky only just figured out (in the last couple of weeks, I think?) that even if you authenticate foo.example.com they need to keep foo.bsky.social reserved, because otherwise they immediately get snapped up for impersonation. So, yeah, possible and already happening, but at least they're trying to mitigate the worst case of it.

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

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

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.

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.

Who said any of this nonsense you're coming out with?

Where did I say I was unhappy with people expressing their opinions? What sort of surreal strawman are you attempting to build here?

My issue was, quite simply, with the predominantly ultra-left phycho's that have taken a foothold there dominating the discourse. Theres no conversations there, as expected, there's just abuse. It's like twitter but in reverse. Probably why the out-of-touch celebrity mass has transfered there, with the assumption that's what real people in real life are actually like...

“ That's my biggest issue with it.”

Those are your words. They literally agree with the OP’s position on free speech. You then go on to state that you don’t like what people say, even though you are lamenting the lack of free speech. You’re a contradiction with a hyper aggressive view of others: calling others “psychos” says more about you and your small minded attitude to others than it does about the people on Bluesky.

So you don’t like what people say. Who cares? Either put up with it because you believe in free speech or stop lamenting the lack of free speech on Bluesky.

And then maybe consider how you view others. Having an opinion of people being psychos just because they don’t align with your worldview is the mindset of the extremist

[flagged]

OR… I wonder if there could be some alternative?

Yes, one should always be wary of the false dichotomy.

Awesome, as usual, put me in that box with all the right wingers. Is there space for a normal liberal nowadays or do I have to fully subscribe to this modern day lunacy? Suppose I better fall in line then. Thanks for the help!

For you.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

I dunno, reading and trying to understand what the author is trying to mean, I still think they're referring to moderation and not servers/infra when they talk about "kingdoms".

But I could be wrong, it has happened before so bound to happen sometime again.

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.

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.

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.

My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger.

As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is getting bigger doesn't mean it's getting fairer.

What I'm saying is the pie is getting bigger, inequality can increase too and that you probably are still better off. If Youtube doubles in size next year, and Mr Beast increases his share of that from let's say 1% to 2%, the remaining 98% is still bigger than the 99% that was shared amongst everyone else last year.

You may look at that and say well that's not fair, most of the benefits are going to Mr Beast - and they are, Mr Beast would have done very well in that scenario. But you're still better off than before. Are you better off relative to Mr Beast? No. But Youtube doesn't owe you that, that's not a reasonable benchmark. If it gets to the point that you're getting worse off, then maybe move to somewhere else, but expecting these places to be good for you in perpetuity is a mistake, and refusing to engage because you fear they won't be good for you in perpetuity is also a mistake. The total benefit of us all engaging makes the pie much bigger, and you almost certainly will get a bigger share of that than by refusing to partake in the pie at all.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think that is federation working as intended. These instance admins are exercising their right to free speech by not federating with instances that contain content they disagree with or disallow on their instance.

I think it's not at all comparable to a corporate entity like X being in full control and able to censor any content.

You may create your own instance and federate with the instances you want. If an instance chooses not to federate with yours you get to decide what's more important to you, your principles or their content.

The solution is to create your own instance. I understand your frustrations but I have a hard time being empathetic to these issues when you are using someone elses instance, probably administered by volunteers in their spare time.

> I think that is federation working as intended

My email provider doesn't prevent me from sending an email from someone at Gmail because someone at Gmail happens to have opposite views to the admin.

Yet email is still federated.

Plenty of email servers will throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with. It's just that most people have migrated to general purpose providers for their personal addresses.

> throw you off for using the domain to email things they disagree with

Right, you can get kicked off for your emails.

But nobody is going to ban you based on which domains you do or do not put on your block list.

Modern email most definitely does block domains and distrust unfamiliar ones (I extend my personal guarantee that getting around spam filters will be an issue if you host your own email), and there most definitey are such things as domain restricted email servers.

Moreover social media faces distinct issues that require specific tools, causing the email analogy to break down a bit. A lot of organized harassment campaigns leverage network effects of platforms in ways that wouldn't work over email. The per instance federating capability helps to mitigate that, and if mitigating harassment is not something that is a priority there are instances you can join that take the open-to-all approach.

I think you didn't understand what I meant.

Those domains are being blocked because of what they send.

They're not being blocked on the basis of what domains they block. There's no recursive blocking that wants you to take a stance and punishes you for being a neutral acceptor of emails. Those blocks are the behavior that can make federation suck.

I accept that I overlooked your distinction here. You are right that there's no recursive blocking with email.

But I also think that's an oversimplification, because the block list is a helpful proxy for content characteristic of an instance.

But this is a case where I think the analogy to email breaks down insofar as its instructive to social media generally, because some things about email don't cleanly map on to what federated instances are managing. It makes sense that you would want to block instances and their enablers, to connect to an ecosystem consistent with the intentions of a particular instance.

As parent commenter said you can use a general purpose provider (with email) or general purpose instance (with Mastodon), so you are accessing the fediverse. The only thing you are "missing out" on is the ability to make it compulsory for other users to listen to you against their consent.

I feel like "people that talk to them" is going a bit far as a definition of "enabler".

And social media posts in this design are pull, not push, so nobody is ever forced to listen to anything. If you block an instance you won't see their posts, no need to block any intermediates.

> to listen to you against their consent.

Then stop trying to make a public discourse and instead make a private forum.

The idea of the fediverse as an agglomeration of private forums is a half-decent mental model. Each instance has its own rules and community, and some of them really hate each other.

Maybe. You'll frequently find many stores/communities/services saying "hotmail/yahoo/___ users, we haven't been getting your emails" because those services aren't quite as big as Gmail and are getting spam-holed or whatever. I'm sure spam filtering already gives a major hit to free email services. If a mail server started up that explicitly permits in its ToS propagation of hate speech and terrorist threats, it's probably going to get blocklisted by all major email services, no?

Flip things around and it's exactly as you describe. Gmail can and has banned small mail servers - even ones that are not in the least malicious.

You may lose access to your Google account. I run my own mail server and honestly despite always hearing that people have problems when doing this I've had 0 trouble in years.

Of course they have a right to free speech, but when I'm choosing a platform it's the user experience that matters to me and not the rights of the operators. Twitter lets me visit or follow any other account on the platform and see what they have to say, and the ability to do that across a wide range of interests and viewpoints is exactly why I use it. If Mastodon requires setting up a custom server to replicate that experience, it's not a good replacement for me.

Look at how many instances agreed to block Threads even before it added ActivityPub support because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't ban (legal) opinions and comments he doesn't agree with.

Some people are so insecure about their own opinions that the pure idea that someone exists that might not agree the same is a threat, never mind seeing their content.

Mastodon.social is the single largest instance and does not block Threads. Where did you get this information, and furthermore, how did you manage to draw a line from that to "Zuck supports free speech, Mastodon doesn't like that?"

>If Mastodon requires setting up a custom server to replicate that experience, it's not a good replacement for me.

It doesn't. It's the other way around; if you want something niche you'll be likely be searching and custom setup, but otherwise you're getting the default experience with the normal amount of discoverability.

> Twitter lets me [...] see what they have to say

* if their viewpoint agrees with Mr. Musk.

No, that's not accurate. I don't agree with all of Musk's moderation decisions, but there are still many large and influential accounts on Twitter who think he's wrong about everything and aren't shy about saying so. (I would not use Twitter anymore if that stopped being the case.)

Your mindset certainly makes me never want to use Mastodon for anything.

Mastodon is worse if you pick servers that insist on being activist, and bother to care about the drama, sure. You don't need to do either.

But then you need to research the severs, shop around, and a bunch of other shit people don’t have time for.

A bad user experience is just that: bad.

Mastodon/ActivityPub is not Twitter. It's not millions of people in one stadium. It's more like dozens of rooms in a big mansion. (sorry, the analogy isn't perfect) ... You don't just walk into the room with a bunch of nazis because that place is probably going to suck to have a conversation in. Look at what the conversations and social expectations are before you jump in, and things will work out a lot better for everyone. That's not a bad user experience, that's just "socializing with fellow humans".

But it’s not diverse enough group of humans to be interesting. I don’t want to hear Linux takes all day.

That’s due to barriers to entry and lack of critical mass.

It's more than big enough for lots of us. It doesn't need to be big enough for everyone.

Just like you need to do when picking a forum to register on or a social media site to sign up to. This isn't something new.

It will also shake out, in that most people will tend towards well-known, large instances that will survive and grow exactly because they refuse to engage with the more obnoxious part of the drama.

I mean sure, but it's entirely an optional communal space? Like...who cares?

The only reason there was even an opinion about Twitter was mainstream news started reporting "what was on Twitter" and it's still centralized in that way - it "felt" non-optional.

Some people enjoy "socializing in the large". For one, I already have a robust personal friend group grounded in traditional social spaces (like my local physical community, former coworkers, friends from my college days, etc) that I don't need to find a communal space online to engage in "socializing in the small". There's nothing wrong with "socializing in the small" of course but for me that's just a group chat.

They should complete the circle and allow instances to invade and take over other instances/subjecate other instances’ users.

Can you please give some more details about the pressure methods in mastodon you are writing about, this is very interesting and important.

Is there any systematic study going on about the mechanism of censorship in the fediverse?

I was in a discussion with someone and the instance just booted me out. No explanation. No appeal. I still had a handful of windows open to various conversations (I’m a slob) and could not find a single reason.

I shopped around for another home and found fussy rules. I got rejected for reasons that made no sense.

It encourages narrow minded balkanization and it retains your identity so you have to form a new one.

Things like one instance banning another whole instance because that instance is not agreeing to the same moderation policies as the first.

I think some instances block all Pleroma instances, because there is an association of Pleroma being used by right wing folks.

Here are failed attempts to ban Pleroma instances outright:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11816 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9708

Here's an example of an instance that blocks other instances if the other instance doesn't have a code of conduct similar to theirs:

https://mastodon.art/about

Note - they partially block mastodon.social!

>mastodon.art is a safe space instance

So don't join them if you don't want to be coddled. Anyone who does wants to engage with a different slice of the fediverse, and why do you care if they don't see you?

I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment or the one I was replying to.

fyi mastodon.social is by far the biggest (almost sole) source of spam, thus more and more servers are "limiting" it (as opposed to outright blocking/defederating) so people only see posts from users they explicitly follow from that server.

Eh, I don't have any links to hand, but I vividly remember when I used Mastodon an instance of an admin being tagged and pressured to remove an individual off their server or be blocked.

was around a year ago

From what I've seen, some niche servers have very detailed and very strict rules intended to address the needs of certain marginalized groups. An example I've seen is requiring a content warning for any image where a person or animal is staring directly into the lens, appearing to make eye contact with the viewer.

Of course pressuring mainstream servers to adopt such a rule is not reasonable. Automatically applying a content warning to all media from servers that don't have the same rule would be a good solution. Bluesky's labelers provide a way to do something similar, but I don't think the Bluesky appview has a way to express something like "blur all media without the 'safe for my needs' label".

>Mastodon ends up creating significant echo chambers where admins ban communication with other instances for having people with different opinions to them

The echo chamber argument itself is a politicized argument that I think fundamentally misunderstands why communities converging on common values can be beneficial rather than simply echoing.

If people are interested in astronomy, or tech security, or FOSS, or politics, weeding the garden leads to more dynamic, diverse and nuanced communication, not less, and the diagnosis of such things as "echo chambers" is a shallow misdiagnosis. Opening up your garden to weeds kills everything and leads to takeover of the one dominant kind of weed that already dominates everywhere else, which is more echoey.

The problem is that many Mastodon servers go far beyond what you describe. Your server can blocked because it doesn't block somebody else, for example. Or because it doesn't have such and such in its rules.

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.

"every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none"

So run your own server.

That sounds like a recipe for a social media platform that never has enough people on it to be even remotely interesting.

From my understanding of messing with Mastodon a bit, users can "subscribe" to other servers in the 'fediverse'. The proposed personal instance can act as a "Home" server and is a part of your handle in a way. It almost functions like a sub identifier. You can browse and interact all throughout the fediverse on a number of topics, while linking people back to the server you came from during engagement.

I found it a lot easier to set up my BlueSky instance than Mastodon.

Mastodon to me feels like it was built with the explicit goal to keep out anybody non-technical, and for technical people, only the type that wants to corner you at a party and discuss the deep philosophical and moral choices of your Linux desktop environment.

You didn't really set up a completely separate server that can exist without Bluesky's central servers (because that's not possible), so it's not a fair comparison.

No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can be moderators, and members can chip in some coin here and there to keep things running. That's about the simplest and most sustainable model I can possibly picture. If you don't know of someone in your social circles who runs a community, that's fine: start out on a public/larger one in the meantime to get things started, and you can move over later! If this is still too hard for someone, that's fine, there are countless centralized services they can remain on, like Facebook, iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, etc.

You really, really live in a privileged socioeconomic bubble if you think every social circle has the money OR expertise to self host.

Poor and uneducated people exist.

> because that's not possible

it isn't? I'm not aware of any relay servers being run but the AT protocol makes affordances for this functionality. Are those features a lie? I read the protocol specification only a few weeks ago, perhaps this is new?

You're correct that the grandparent's PDS isn't the same as a Mastodon homeserver but that's probably a good thing; the network functions much differently than the ActivityPub federation

To my knowledge you can't run your own self-contained Bluesky server/network that doesn't go through (or at least partially rely on) services owned/operated by the Bluesky corporation.

> A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

> The cost of running a full-network, fully archiving relay has increased over time. After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network.

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

> The fediverse currently hosts around 27,000 servers (many more users, but let's focus on servers). Adding just 5 more servers would be a blip in terms of the affect on the network. Adding 5 more servers to an ATProto ecosystem with that many fully participating nodes would be an exhausting number of additional messages sent on the network. ATProto does not scale wide: it's a liability to add more fully participating nodes onto the network. Meaningfully self-hosting ATProto is a risk to the ATProto network, there is active reason to disincentivize it for those already participating.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

[plus more]

https://mathewingram.com/work/2024/11/28/is-bluesky-really-d...

https://en.futuroprossimo.it/2024/11/anatomia-di-bluesky-e-d...

Not true. Everything made by BlueSky is open source, including the apps.

Anyone can host their own data.

Bluesky has said they have zero intention on opening advertising because the platform isn’t built for that paradigm.

No investor or potential buyer would get ROI from an open network. If they tried, anyone could open a new public good atproto network and users could easily migrate their data.

The very thing that gave Twitter value was it owned all its data. Bluesky does not own anyone’s data. They just host it.

Bluesky has a new crypto investor with a board seat, but there are no signs the investor has made any demands.

I think Bluesky will beat the odds.

if you're not running a relay, you're not truly decentralized. bluesky, in controlling the only working relay, continues to be a centralized platform.

What you're describing there is the "actual work" which can either be done by someone else and funded by investor capital (see the beginning of this thread) or you learn to do it yourself and in return you are not beholden to investors who will eventually try to extract a profit from you and your peers.

Easy is seldom truly free.

Plenty of free software is easy to install. Why should it take "actual work"?

To keep people out.

Just a reminder that this was how it always was before. Then people got lazy, people forgot how to RUN a community, and here we are.

Moaning that federation is not decentralisation without even considering running their own instance, and when you suggest that, they turn around and say 'oh it's too hard'...

Oh how I miss the times of interest-based forums with ACTUAL moderation, large IRC channels where assholes got kicked and none of this amorphous mass of people and bots producing unmoderated brainrot that then gets turned into AI slop-based timelines optimised for the sole purpose of stimulating people's dopamine receptors until they burn out...

The promise of Opera Unite was that instead of sharing with someone on Facebook, or wherever, you could invite them to peer with you via your browser. You could share messages, share files, follow blog-type posts with everything p2p.

That seemed to me like it should have been the next evolution of the net, and still seems that way. All right there in your browser (which was also a server, it United those two groups of functions) democratising the internet...

harder in practice because many large instances block single user instances because abuse was an afterthought to the activitypub designers.

Also, if you want to operate a home server, you also have to be willing to have a public file upload endpoint capable of receiving and storing arbitrary data on your server (because that's how ActivityPub works), and people send your server a lot of data, and a lot of that data will be extremely unsavory, and it will be your responsibility to make sure you remove anything illegal that someone on another server uploads to yours.

I wasn't willing to take that risk, myself.

We nerds are never going to beat the allegations, are we?

How many people are running their own mail outside of large orgs or privacy/security niche? How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?

> How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?

The whole appeal of email-style decentralization is that even in those cases, Google can only block you from GMail - not email as a whole, which would be far more deleterious, and is the ever-present threat in non-decentralized platforms.

Number of people using Gmail is basically 100%

Your implausible estimate got me curious; so I checked[1,2] the first couple of result from Google on email marketshare. GMail is 27.7%. Apple has double the share, at 54%, you should be worried about Apple instead.

1. https://www.litmus.com/email-client-market-share

2. https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients

That’s clients.

People add their Gmail account to their iPhone and get Apple Mail.

Virtually all email goes to Gmail between personal accounts and GSuite stuff.

That's unbelievably high for Apple when its hardware market share is much less than that (around 30% for iphones and significantly less than 20% for laptops and desktops, hard to quickly find consistent numbers).

When I look at the email addresses in the various communities I belong to, it’s at least 80% gmail, and the rest are mostly defunct services are just barely hanging on. Yes, I run my own email server, have for years.

> the rest are mostly defunct services are just barely hanging on.

...and what a miserable bunch most of them were: 2 MB attachment limits and 10 MB mailbox quotas?! GMail had to drag all of them kicking and screaming into the 21st century when they debuted with a 1 GB mailbox quota.

It's easier to run your own Mastodon server than your own mail server (for the exact reason you cite).

I never ran my AP server but i did run my own mail in my late teens/early twenties. I don't recall it being particularly difficult, compared to eg setting a webserver.

Just install some software from your distro PM and go through some configs. Nothing stopped some hacker from bundling configs with a point and click installer for android eg - A mail server doesnt need 100% uptime - or for servers.

As for reaching others, ive never had problems because my domains had dkim and whatever else was available set up - could be easily automated like web certificates were, and i never send spam... How is that inherently more difficult? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to argue - just citing my own experience.

What's to stop major servers ("gmail" and "hotmail" of AP) from blocking you? Obviously some aspects are different from mail as it is geared for wide distribution rather than directed communication, but it's not obvious to me that the decentralization problem is solved by a model that seems superficially close to email.

Again, im not trying to troll you as im unfamiliar with AP - i genuinely don't know.

Setting up a mail server is now more complicated due to blocking of residential blocks, specific IP addresses needing good reputation, and the general stance taken by most MTAs is to assume senders are guilty until proven innocent. Setting up Mastodon now is easier than setting up email in the past - you don't even have to worry about DKIM or not spamming - most Fedi instances consider other instances innocent until proven guilty, a slow and human-powered process.

Sender-reputation management and anti-spam automation is far advanced and far more stringent for email than it is for Mastodon/the fediverse. Setting up a Mastodon instance is a matter of installing a package and going through a browser wizard comparable to setting up a Wordpress instance, not difficult at all.

I understand this, but you seem to have ignored my point in that it is trivially easy to make something similar for email and yet no one did, and that it is unclear what’s to stop the same situation from happening again when 90% of users have a lemmy.org or whatever address.

Or like happened with the original decentralized web. there was once a thing called a “blog” that you could host on your own server from your home, but these days everyone is “blogging” through fb twitter and instagram (or your choice of a few platforms). Why is this time different?

I failed to respond simply because I didn't realize you were making that point. To me, the existence of large players in a decentralized system is not something in need of addressing or fixing; IMO, decentralization is not the right tool to achieve egalitarianism - but it's a great way to avoid a monoculture.

The fediverse, like email and most other human systems that benefit from economies of scale will have a Pareto distribution with very large free providers > ISP / work and community instances > individual instances. Banking is decentralized and interoperable, this doesn't prevent banking giants from existing the world over - I expect them to exist, I also am in favor of smaller regional and local banks and credit unions.

decentralization is not some magical binary property. Real world systems can be more, or less, decentralized.

To start with, yes banking giants exists but everyone finds this undesirable to a certain extent and regulators would object if suddenly eg elon musk decided to buy out goldman and chase.

banks are highly regulated and enjoy completely different economies than email. Banks of the same nation are often legally required to be interoperable with others. Yes, there are still big players and you can eg get sanctioned by the US - which is why BRIC countries are working on alternative banking networks.

with banks, most jurisdictions would disallow a merger of two large banks specifically from decentralization considerations - guess what would happen if two email providers merge? exactly nothing.

With email, if gmail decide to ban you, you are unable to communicate with 90% of people with no recourse. A support engineer can decide to ban you on a whim and besides crying on social media, you can’t do much.

With banks, you need a large and powerful nation to tell other banks not to play with you, and you can contest this decision legally.

Most importantly, with banking money is the product and every transaction brings revenue, so there’s a strong incentive to cooperate. With email - and AP - cooperation incurs a cost on all parties instead and benefits are distributed and vague in monetary terms.

Finally, banks are required to deal with you as a customer - provided you meet certain requirements. An email provider can ban you for no reason and your only recourse is arbitration.

Compare to bitcoin. Will you still be calling it decentralized when one pool controls 90% of compute (i don’t think this can really happen tbh as there are disincentives to go 51% without abusing the network)?

Don’t get me wrong AP sure feels in the right direction compared to eg FB. Just on the principle of being able to run it completely in your own. However it would be nice if whatever new alternative that grew popular treated users, rather than providers, democratically.

> With email, if gmail decide to ban you, you are unable to communicate with 90% of people with no recourse

To reiterate my point (and perhaps what you said in your first sentence) this is completely unrelated to the decentralized nature of email, and is proof that decentralization is ill-suited to avoid that problem: legislation and oversight are what works for banking. "Decentralized" has never meant "there are no dominant players"

Edit: when it comes to tech platforms or protocols, the ability to decentralize is binary: it's present or absent. There is one Twitter/Instagram namespace with no other instances, there are countless email MTA and MDA and standards for interoperability defined in RFCs. That GMail is dominant is not a fault of the protocol - it happened to be a superior product for reasons not included in the protocol like generous mailbox storage quotas, and superior spam identification.

I understand your claim though dont agree on several counts -

1. To start, if decentralization does not "solve the problem" then what do all AP platforms bring to the table? There was already a decentralized facebook before mastodon - it used to be called a "web site". You could get a feed with just what you wanted by subscribing to rss feeds, which were also decentralized. You were not tied to 140 characters per post either, and nothing stopped someone from making an rss client that clipped posts at 140 characters in the the feed or whatever. What problem does AP solve for me? Indexing all that content? The hosting? If the whole thing is about getting banned from the domain twitter.com, open your own domain and publish your content - problem solved.

2. If we're solving a solved problem, why not bring something new to the table? eg anonymity of nosr.

3. If "decentralization is not the solution", how come other protocols - eg mentioned above - claim (convincingly imho) to offer an actual improvement if not solution?

4. You claim "decentralization is not the solution" then define some ad hoc line in the sand regarding what is "decentralized" and then make some bold claims based on that. Decentralized could mean many things: could be like ssh keys, could be like gpg keys with directories and web of trust, could be like dns or certificate authorities. Could be like email. Like torrents or like i2p, or kad. All of these are slightly different. Heck, could even mean like fb vs twitter - you are free to move to a different platform. Takeout your data, import contacts - done.

Where you claim that decentralization is not the answer i will say maybe insufficient decentralization is not the answer - with email, AP, and many other protocols, the platform ("domain") is the first class citizen so you get strong platforms and weak users. Regulation will help here just like it helped with banking - ie wont. What makes banks cooperate is mutual desire for profit.

Banks are truly fungible for the most part - make users first class and you will get the same for platforms

> 1. To start, if decentralization does not "solve the problem" then what do all AP platforms bring to the table? There was already a decentralized facebook before mastodon - it used to be called a "web site". You could get a feed with just what you wanted by subscribing to rss feeds, which were also decentralized

Personal websites still soundly lost to the Yahoo, MSN and AOL home pages (remember those?) Pareto distributions are everywhere, even with systems whose decentralized nature is as unquestionable as websites - I'm probably sounding like a broken record now, but it's clear as day to me.

You mention of old-school websites crystalized some inchoate thoughts I had. The fediverse is the spiritual successor to Web 2.0 / the blogoshpere in the age of social media and mobile apps. Instead of RSS feeds, loosey goosey comment and pingback implementations, everything is in a fairly well-defined spec that allows the conversations to be viewed on one web application or app by simply scrolling. What AP brings to the table are:

A. the ability to own the platform as an individual, or as a collective of like-minded people. There's a qualitative difference between r/math and Mathstodon, even both are on on the surface self-moderated Math communities. Even if such communities are blocked and defederated from the rest of the world, I think there's incalculable value in the community self-reliance as an end to itself without being mediated by a profit-seeking entity. I acknowledge this is an ideological proclivity, YMMV.

B. gives more editorial power to users over what they see (though this is woefully underspecified, but apps can and do fill the gap)

C. Better aggregation and discovery than websites. Closed and centralized social platforms are inherently great at this, but RSS feeds, not so much. If you find a website commenter particular insightful, you can't "subscribe to their newsletter" - you can with AP.

2. why not bring something new to the table? eg anonymity of nosr.

It's good to have many approaches tried out and available to people. I want the balance of power to be shifted more towards people - protocols are just implementation details. Id people choose to fo with the megacorp-hosted implementation of an interoperable standard (like Threads is claiming to aspire to), so be it. The existence of AP does not preclude nostr or AT, or Wordpress or Ghost

3.If "decentralization is not the solution", how come other protocols - eg mentioned above - claim (convincingly imho) to offer an actual improvement if not solution

I suppose everyone has well-reasoned and well-intended bases for their opinions, even when we disagree. I don't believe any protocol can counteract economies of scale without detrimental effects to smaller players, which is why I don't they can solve it - it'd be fantastic if they pull if off - I don't think they will - but I'm glad someone is trying. I wish nothing but the best to each project

> 4. You claim "decentralization is not the solution" then define some ad hoc line in the sand regarding what is "decentralized" and then make some bold claims based on that. Decentralized could mean many things: could be like ssh keys, could be like gpg keys with directories and web of trust, could be like dns or certificate authorities. Could be like email. Like torrents or like i2p, or kad

I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.

You raise some good points regarding benefits of integration in AP. I mentioned some classic technologies that could be packaged well together to form something cohesive, you claim this is it. Ok, i concede - i think i would be interested in a “platformless”, websitelike protocol but that doesn’t preclude something like an interoperable forumlike protocol from being useful.

That being said, > I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.

Most of what i mentioned is indeed semi centralized - but also semi decentralized. it and that was the point - there is no one true way to “decentralize” - is the star trek federation decentralized? is banks’ culture?

You make some very general claims regarding what decentralized systems don’t solve, but whatever your argument, you base it off some specific model of what is decentralized (you define a binary criterion). Whatever you claim, you can claim only for that model and indeed! that model doesn’t attempt to solve many problems that found in previous decentralized models and that are desirable to solve, and hence my criticism.

We’ve designed a slightly more advanced wordpress. Let’s celebrate! I would hope for something more imaginative. And indeed some are trying.

And, people are free to work on what they like of course - who am i to judge? Well, unfortunately i find myself to not be in the position and with a strong enough passion about this to do something myself, but im affected just as everyone alive is.

I do see seemingly better attempts as we’ve discussed, and in this particular case im worried that worse is the enemy of better, due to network effects. Any traction of a worse platform takes away from a better one.

Finally, gpg keys existed way before keybase and are actually one of the actually distributed and decentralized systems, so it’s curious that you picked specifically on this example.

gpg keys are entirely local first. Actually decentralized and usable to the individual user level. On top were built various webs of trust by mutual signing and publication of public keys to various public directories.

Keybase were able to package this neatly with added features and they enjoy some network effects but their data is public - you could spin up a compatitor before the end of the year ( it is dec 31 :) without losing any data. Or with a completely separate web of trust, that could also trust keybase keys.

ssh keys are similar in this regard, except the usage patterns are different and so keys are trusted on an individual basis or when signed by some organization/“community” wide ca. Im sure you know all this already.

Both of these last two examples demonstrate that in some cases decentralization does work, well. If we go with your “decentralized” model - “power to the states, not the people” - inevitably you get monopolistic players that kill off the standard as youve observed yourself. Like happened with email, with jabber, with rss, with browsers, like will happen with AP.

This is not a faster, quieter, cleaner or more efficient dishwasher. This is the exact same one we had last year, except with chrome finish, touch buttons and built in wifi. It will get picked up by the same sort of people that bought the old version - namely ones buying their first one or whose 10 machine broke.

It will fail and be unsatisfactory in fundamentally the same ways, since nothing changed in the mechanical specs. And in 10 years some extra features will be added like a voice assistant, to justify the raised priced on the same old crap.

Is that just an artifact of its relative unpopularity? Running your own email server used to be easy too, before the spammers wrecked it. If Mastodon became popular, it would presumably come with a large spam problem, with the same sorts of solutions.

> How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?

Had to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC, then it started working again.

This doesn't solve the problem. One "wrong" word and instance mods cut your ties.

Do you run your own email server?

Bluesky is centralized. Mastodon is decentralized. Neither is distributed.

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.

for me it is extremely political and boring

i’ve also found that due to shareable ban lists, im often already banned by someone i want to follow (merely on the basis of who i follow, i don’t think i’ve ever posted on bkuesky)

So your "follow" list is required to be public? Seems like a design flaw.

It is definitely a perk. If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either. Some people are block happy, but being able cut off chains of people is a perk. I'm also pretty sure OG Twitter and Mastodon let you see followers. If you could make them private, I never found any user that actually did that.

> then I understand that they share values in some way

Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed? I feel it's relatively common for someone to want to keep an eye on, say, what Trump is posting even if they detest him.

Probably becomes self-reinforcing in that by treating follows as a public endorsement, many people start following only what they want to be seen endorsing instead of what they want on their timeline. Which leaves a void for a timeline of what I want to see instead of what I want to be seen endorsing, probably currently filled (slightly awkwardly) by using an alternate account or visiting the profiles manually.

> Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?

Emphatically no, and it’s one of the things that I dislike about what blocklists have become on Bluesky.

The fact that many people now view follows as some kind of endorsement speaks to how much social media has deteriorated and arguably makes the polarization problem worse - not just because people are making themselves ignorant of what public figures are saying, but they’re isolating themselves from the people they actually do align with who choose to keep themselves informed, further reinforcing the echo chamber.

Depending on your primary reason for using social media, I realize how attractive it is to quickly lock down your feeds. But it comes with a dark side, and blocking someone for no reason other than following an account is part of that dark side IMO.

“Is it expected that people only ever want to see content that aligns with their views in their feed?”

It is for those that need safe spaces. I love hearing the nonsense on both sides so I’m sure I would be blocked by people not ready to listen to such views due to fragility issues.

It depends on what your personal philosophy of blocklists is. If you believe that on a supermassive social network that no single person's content is worth anything and can safely discarded then what you're interested in is signal and a low false negative rate.

Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values. Is it always accurate, no, you stand as an example of such a person but their feed is still full and the kind of people they have in mind they don't want to see are gone.

Reddit has a similar culture with extensions that let you hide users that subscribe to or have ever posted in certain subreddits. It works better than it has any right to.

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values

I strongly disagree, and believing this to be true is a problem for public discourse IMO.

What a person posts and who they repost is a strong signal of their values. I dislike/disagree with the validity of a social construct where people who choose to stay informed are assumed to hold values they do not.

absolutely agreed

+ most of my inclusion in these blocklists is due to actions taken by someone i follow after i followed them (some AI person I followed who posted bluesky posts on huggingface). it really is ridiculous to read a follow as an endorsement

i think this is more of a cultural issue with bluesky than a technical issue/flaw

I don't think you can really decide whether something is a useful signal or not. I don't and can't assume anything about an individual because they follow Evil McBaddington. But the fun thing about statistics is I that I can assume a great many things about the set of all people who follow Evil McBaddington.

I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers. The forward direction being a thing and that thing in a for loop are equivalent in essence, and the reverse being that a property being true about a set means it's true for its members (can decompose aggregate statements into an equivalent for loop acting on each member).

> I don't think you can really decide whether something is a useful signal or not. I don't and can't assume anything about an individual because they follow Evil McBaddington.

Maybe I misunderstood your comment, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of what you’re saying here?

> Who a person follows is a pretty strong signal of their values

If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”, I’d probably agree. But this is a vastly different statement than “following someone strongly indicates endorsement”.

> I see this "scale invariant fallacy" all the time with programmers.

I think it’s problematic to bring too much of an engineering mindset to a social issue like this. Algorithms can be cleanly and rigidly defined. Social issues tend to be messy and complicated.

In terms of pure utility, it may be true that blocking people based on who they follow results in a clean feed at a low (effort) cost. But perpetuating the idea that following someone equals endorsement has longer term social costs and gets into dystopian territory pretty quickly, and depending on why someone is using social media, the impact of entirely excluding the group of people that “follow but disagree” is likely not small. If you’re on there for cat memes, probably not a big deal. If you’re trying to stay informed or be politically active, probably a bigger deal.

And regardless of use case, believing things about other people reflexively based on something like follow status is not a healthy place for society to be. Most people do not appreciate the nuance of what you’re describing as “scale invariant fallacy”.

My biggest issue here is the framing and the questionable/harmful conclusions that can be derived from it.

> If your position is closer to “on average, people who follow other people tend to be more aligned with the people they follow”

Maybe it's a semantic thing but is that not what is meant by this usage of the word signal?

"A child growing up in an affluent neighborhoods is a strong signal of their future success." implies => "The proportion of the set of all kids who live in affluent neighborhoods who achieve success as adults is high."

That’s not how I read your use of signal in the broader context.

Putting people on lists for who they follow is a growing trend and it’s pretty clear in Bluesky culture that many people actually believe following someone implies some kind of support for that person and “taints” the follower somehow. This goes alongside a host of problematic behaviors ranging from all-or-nothing thinking “if you’re not with us you’re against us” to simple bad faith.

My goal isn’t to argue here, but to understand and clarify what you meant.

It sounds like you didn’t literally mean that on an individual basis, following someone strongly indicates their values, but that in the aggregate (due to the current social climate), it’s more likely they won’t follow people they disagree with.

I don’t think this is just a matter of semantics given the context, but a necessary clarification.

In the affluent neighborhoods example, there’s no call to action (block people), the situation isn’t a highly charged issue in the cultural zeitgeist, and there aren’t a lot of reasons someone would interpret that example in some other way.

The same is not true for the current social media climate.

Nobody cares about your public discourse. Your opinion is not that important to 99.9999% of the people on this planet. I use social media to follow people I like and see funny jokes and if a few people undeservedly catch a block oh well, that's the price of a curated feed.

Call it an echo chamber, but nobody has a right to have their posts be seen

I was reacting to the very direct and unqualified statement that who a person follows strongly indicates their values.

If you’re just using social media for entertainment, I don’t care who you block or how. But perpetuating the idea that “follow equals endorsement” is a problem regardless.

This has less to do with people having a right to be seen and more to do with the perpetuation of ideas that make society more polarized in spaces where such things matter.

To put this another way, I’d react less strongly to “blocking people based on who they follow weeds out almost everyone I don’t want to see and I accept the false positives”. I’d still express concerns about the resulting echo chamber but that’s a far more reasonable position.

It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes.

It can also be pretty effective for stopping brigading. Back in the day, when he was still a darling of the far-right, I managed to offend Milo Yiannopolis on Twitter (turns out he twitter-searched his own name) and he siced his followers on me. It took about a day of mass blocklists (back when these kinda worked on Twitter), and individual blocking, to stem the flow of spam; a button to simply block everyone who followed Milo Yiannopolis would have been convenient, and nothing of value would have been lost.

> It can be a decent _heuristic_ for “I probably don’t want to hear from this person”. Like, it’s not bulletproof, but the _cost_ of a false positive is low. I think “follows Trump” would be a not-great heuristic, for the reason you mention, but, say, ‘follows libsoftiktok’ is probably a good heuristic for filtering out arseholes.

I feel you're calling something a good heuristic based solely on how predictive it is, and not considering the impacts of using that heuristic. A property tax based on the number of windows in a house[0] may have acceptably low false positives, but encourages people to brick up their windows.

Here it makes follows performative rather than just about what I'm interested in seeing on my timeline, since I'd now be hesitant to follow content that doesn't align with my views. In addition, everyone on the site being discouraged from receiving content from outside their bubble seems likely to exacerbate echo chambers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

> then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either.

komerad iteriasky, our sources tell us that you poses book on kaptialism. Why you share depraved views, komerad? This very bad for you.

alternatively...

Mr. iteria, we see that you've checked out a book by Marx from the public library. Why are you a communist mr iteria, and do you know that by being one you're putting our brave republic in grave danger? We shall revoke your right to work in any government position from now on. Red danger, mr iteria.

----

How on earth did we go through all that crap in our recent history, and people still think that reading something is sharing those values?! And banning them preemptively?

> If I see someone whose posts are abhorrent and someone is following them, then I understand that they share values in some way and I don't want to see them either

yeah, a lot of bluesky members seem to hold this attitude - but it is not correct & moreso incentivizes epistemic bad practices

Your follow list is public on Twitter as well. But BlueSky being designed to be federated ends up exposing a whole lot of data which should probably be private.

The block issue could probably be resolved by a 3rd party server which could let you still follow users who have blocked you. All this data is publicly available on the api. Obviously they wouldn't see your posts still.

curiosity-joined a month ago, 90% of discover feed is politics

I have no idea how their Discover "algorithm" works. At this point I think it's using posts I clicked on to block the author of as ones it thinks I'm interested in (it definitely is using that for suggested accounts to follow). I tried using the feedback feature on what posts I want to see more/less of but there's been no obvious improvement.

Hm, maybe for a fresh account today. I just checked and my discover feed is pretty much just art and photography.

Maybe Bluesky needs to ask a few questions the first time a new user looks at the discover feed to prime it for them.

Personally I'd prefer if there was no default algorithmic feed but I know that just doesn't work. People will create an account, see nothing in their feed, and leave because the site seems dead or because they can't even fathom how to get started finding people to follow or custom feeds to add.

they do - they ask… the “problem” is that it is too broad… I picked “science” and there were myriad of post with pictures of various galaxies… pretty but after you see 27 of them…

with the new accounts it is also asking to like 10 posts and follow 7 accounts so that it can try to figure shit out. it can be trained for sure but when I first joined to try it out it was just politics - mostly left-leaning praising Dr Fauci (very confusing) and stuff like that. I don’t use social media - no X, Facebook, Insta, TikTok… all were tried but eventually discarded … bluesky will suffer the same faith :)

Discover is based off your follows and likes after a certain threshold. Before that it's based on everyone's likes and follows. For a new user it's not the best, but as you use the site it gets better.

I've also been on it since it was invite only, and was immediately turned off by how American-political it was. I spent an hour or two trying to curate my feed out of that and into interesting content, and found there wasn't a lot of that.

I got back on it recently to give it another try, and it's somewhat better now - in that the proportion of USpolitics posts is still likely the same, but at least in absolute numbers there's enough non-USpol posts to make a good experience.

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

Yesterday, I opened up BlueSky on a non-logged-in computer, and 90% of the default feed was US politics, most of it rageful. I don't know what you qualify as "rage bait", but a majority of BlueSky content is at least angry and caustic.

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/

This is absolutely true. Bluesky can become decentralized but it will take a fair amount of work.

What BLuesky does do is keep the door open for competition. If you want, you can stand up a version of its entire system (all open source). Or, you could write your own system that uses the AT Proto DID stuff to let people access their posts and follows, etc, in any way you want.

And, BLuesky also serves as a bootstrap for AT Proto writ large. The whole distributed identity thing has huge potential going forward and it’s use by Bsky is an excellent start.

“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.

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

> any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political

This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political.

Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political. Using no social media at all is political. And so on.

Decentralization is political because even from a sniff test it is very very concerned about evading existing centers of power.

Common Lisp is not political. Technical people might say it is political, but non-technical people outside would just chuckle at the conversation — nerds fighting among themselves in an unseen corner with no power, thinking that there's "politics" there and perhaps everywhere too.

> This hasn't said anything of value, since everything is political.

I really disagree with this statement. Many things are political, but not everything. (Unless you’re abstracting the word political to the point of it meaning any human relationship. At which point the word isn’t useful)

Some choices are just convenience.

Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone.

I use discord frequently because all of my friends are on there, not because I particularly care for their politics.

My choice to not use social media sites like fb and Twitter was fueled by mental health concerns and the time I’d sink into them, not because they lean left or right.

> Limiting your interaction with the world to sanitized corporate/Hollywood social media is political.

Not necessarily. Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction.

They just want updates about things they care about. That need not be about politics.

Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.

> Some choices are just convenience. > Most people don’t know they’re limiting their interaction.

Sure, but they often carry political implications (even if the choice/chooser was unconscious of them)

> Most people with an iPhone don’t choose to text on messenger because of a political opinion, it’s just because it’s the default app on their phone.

That's not the best example to make your point considering many people see iPhones (and its "exclusive" text bubble color) as an economic and social class signifier.

The insane planned obsolescence model of the iPhone necessitating constant replacement has environmental consequences, etc. Once again, the end user being unaware of all of this does not prevent it from still being very real.

> Just because a choice may have political ramifications doesn’t mean that it was a choice made for political reasons.

Never said otherwise. A reminder of what I replied to:

> 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.

My original point was that merely "avoiding political things" by using platform Y instead of Z does not exempt one from being political. The act of choosing to opt out of politics in this way or any other is literally political and has real consequences.

This seems like a category error. Topics that have political aspects, e.g. environmentalism, also have non-political aspects.

Also, it just seems like an excuse for mob mentality. It's "if you're not for us you're against us" with extra steps.

Being politically conscious instead of proudly checking out to the Soma drip feed of sanitized media is not mob mentality. Though, the minority holders of the majority of capital would very much like people to parrot such nonsense.

"If you're not with us you're against us" is the basest way to be politically conscious, not the only way.

> by using platform Y instead of Z does not exempt one from being political

That’s… exactly what I was saying with “ any platform that uses decentralization as a selling point is inherently political”…

Yes, but you implied (intentionally or not) the inverse is not true, which is the point I'm making.

Any platform that uses "not decentralized" as a selling point is also political. The inverse of Political Thing is still political.

Saying A is true doesn’t imply that the inverse of A is not true…

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.

Absolutely, and users can choose custom moderation and block lists to offload the work to someone else.

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

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".

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

Or am I confusing with Gab ?

Both are non-federating Mastodon instances.

> 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.

I’m hoping that the problems caused by their effort to avoid viewpoint moderation will be overcome by their composable self-moderation idea. It is increasingly straightforward to control what you see (graze.social is a good example, along with number tools inside bsky itself), both for safety and for creating a well-tuned echo chamber.

Add some more tools to facilitate selection of people to block and the only real problem left will be people demanding performative loyalty acts.

I think Mastodon and the Fediverse is better equipped for this kind of thing. The software itself acts like a "common carrier", and the networks formed by the instance operators align according to their politics. Truth Social itself is built on Mastodon.

I really wanted mastodon to take off but in practice it just hasn’t seemed to, or at least any spaces that are worth using are also not discoverable.

Anecdotally, as someone who mostly used Twitter for math and theoretical CS (plus some news and current events) I feel like I ought to have been able to fairly easily find a community on mastodon but I never did. BlueSky is doing much better as a replacement for tech twitter and math twitter.

I suspect the centralization is necessary to an extent to get critical momentum. You could replicate something like that in mastodon maybe, but nobody seems to have done so in practice and I’m skeptical they will. Truth Social is probably the best example but from what I know, but it never hit the scale of Twitter even with a fairly ravenous core audience.

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/

| 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.

> 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.

Thanks I probably should have read the other comments.

I haven't registered for a new Bluesky account in a while now, but when I joined there was no algorithmic feed. The "Discover" feed was added later. The default feed for me at least is still the timeline. I do occasionally glance at the "Discover" feed, but I ended up writing my own feed algorithms for my own uses that I use more often.

Though I will say, even on my purely time-based feed, ragebait always wins. People like ragebait. Today <Jane Johnson> is a nazi. Tomorrow <insert bad customer service story> so corporations are evil. While my examples are colored by the folks I follow, I'll bet this makes up the majority of content online.

I've been trying to work on a feed that removes this kind of ragebait but it's proving real hard especially when the post is sarcastic. I'd love to connect with folks who have worked on algorithmic feeds in the past and know how to crack this problem. Right now Muted Words tend to do the trick when there's a new Villain (not always a person, sometimes an entity) of the Day on my feed, but I'd love to do this automatically.

| ragebait always wins. People like ragebait.

Sure but we don't need to help it along. People are gonna people, we shouldn't create machines that encourage the worst tendencies.

If Bluesky goes the advertising route (likely) they'll find just like everyone else that stoking fires is the best way to ensure engagement, which ensures eyeballs, which benefits advertisers.

My problem with ads is not the ads themselves, it's that the ads become the customer, and the users become the product being sold to the advertisers. This creates a series of perverse economic incentives that significantly shift the way the site is designed and developed.

Last I heard Bluesky was contemplating a paid app with enhanced features and also some rumors about hosted domains. They haven't ruled out ads. I'm not sure where that landed and how far along that process they are. The most I know about the situation is this interview [1] here on TechCrunch.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-...

There are increasing numbers of new ways to generate feeds that suit your needs. I use the list functions to segregate people I follow into categories. There are a couple of built-in feeds that help discover new people.

But, the best thing is exemplified by graze.social which gives you a huge amount of ways to filter the firehose feed into whatever you want. Leave out the rage bait? It’s a filter sequence away.

Me? I do not want to avoid the villain a day problem. I want to see and block them myself, to know what’s going on.

Yeah I'm aware of feed generation and as I said I wrote my own feeds to do some of this filtering. I really should use Lists more often, you bring up a good point.

I'm a huge fan of how easy it is to have editorial control of your feed on Bluesky and the concept of a standard Bluesky identity.

I’m hoping they turn into a Wikipedia sort of funding model. Avoid viewpoint discrimination and serve messages to everyone with lots and lots of composable moderation tools.

In what way was Twitter's funding model its demise? What? Because they had advertising, they turned into a negative community? Disagree.

Advertiser-optimized engagement feeds have caused the user experience of all social media to degrade not just Twitter.

Facebook has degraded the most but twitter moved towards favoring rage bait 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.

To be clear: I'm not talking about TFA. I'm talking about OP. TFA had substance for sure. But the OP just vaguely talks about taking VC money.

This is distinctive because the AT Protocol exists to specifically prevent the degradation that VC does. So I'm curious what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect. That's why I linked Christine Lemmer-Webber's post.

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

I find that funny that folks think Bluesky has astroturfing around it, but sure you're welcome to think that way. HN is pretty big these days.

what about Bluesky and the AT Protocol are of concern here that VC capture could affect

Is BlueSky linking and federating with other privately run ATProto servers yet, so posts are shared between them and it actually becomes decentralized?

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.

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

> 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.

Custom CSS or userscripts become much harder with obfuscated JS.

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.

I think it's only feasible to go with this "classic web" approach by having it be a paid service.

Yes as mentioned above, a very low cost subscription would be ideal. Taking investment and using the 2010 era growth model would doom the user experience as we’ve seen.

A paid service, even at a comically low price, would be a hard sell at first but that could change as people see the value.

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.

> 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.

I don't care about well known people. I could perhaps rebuild networks but I really haven't and I like many others I've thrown my arms up in the air and said whatever.

I understand what you're saying, but you're not addressing the concern on what is alive or dead. Just because it sucks for you doesn't mean it sucks for everyone. Even if it sucks for 90% of folks, 10% of the Internet population is probably 10-100x what's needed for a network to survive and thrive.

Not everyone has the same goals as you.

You are but one generation and the next won't have your same baggage.

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?

It isn't dead in any meaningful way. Every time there's an issue with a service (Musk writes something obnoxious, 2 day outage, rules change) people create accounts on competing services, but are back within a week because those places don't have content or engagement. Some people do migrate, and it's possible to get the impression that Twitter is dead if this happens to your social circle, but to me it seems as active as ever.

Dead is probably an overstatement and I agree that the alternative services don't seem to have a lot of traction, at least among people I've followed. However, in my tech circles, it seems like a lot of people (and organizations) just checked out of or way dialed down their usage of Twitter/X and relations. YMMV of course but Musk seems to have been a forcing function for a lot of people to reevaluate their use of such services in general. To the degree that there's a commercial winner, it's probably LinkedIn.

I'm not sure that NBC/MSNBC news was ever the primary reason people went to Twitter. There are no shortages of mainstream news sources. That was never my interest in Twitter.

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).

I don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely.

e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?

I know the admin of my server and all moderators personally. I'm not sure what your point is. The people who run services you use can mess with your stuff - in WoW a GM stole items from my guild's guild bank using the account of a guildmate who was permabanned, for example.

It’s simply not credible to expect tens of thousands of random people to be scrupulous 100% of the time.

Centralized services try to solve the issue by simply never giving out such authority outside of a small handpicked group. (And even then a reddit admin was caught red handed doing it a while back)

Edit: And so the trust that takes years to build up can be lost in a few seconds of bad decisions…

> Mastodon is absolutely not dead,

It sucks though, I don't know ONE normal person who's on Mastodon.

Thank god for that... I love Mastodon, but the moment it experiences an Eternal September, I will be done once and for all with social media.

At this point I consider the technical/usability hurdles of it a feature that filters out people that are not my kind of people...

I don't know one normal person who's on Hacker News either

Oh yeah? I know a few ppl who are on fediverse but aren't comfortable sharing their account, interestingly. Also, yeah, for now it's mostly techie/geeky/academic types who are on Mastodon, with a good slice of artistic/creative people coming in as well. I follow a couple artists who barely know how to use the software but are posting frequently and having lots of good discussions and stuff. Pretty sweet.

Oh also, it might seem more dead than it really is because some people post primarily "followers-only". I only have one or two posts a month that can be seen by "everyone".

How has Bluesky degraded?

Bluesky has not yet degraded.

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

Would agree except for the part where they have not said anything concrete about their funding model.

If you’re talking about venture money, it’s a public benefit LLC. The demands that can be made on them are limited by that.

For the record, I am extremely skeptical that public benefit corps can resist market forces in any considerable way and I'm not alone in that concern. We're early enough in the history of benefit corporations that I may be proven wrong based on how enforcement and methods of legal accountability play out, but for the time being I consider them indistinguishable from standard corporations.

Non-profits are much more time tested and concretely structured.

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.

> 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?

Which is funny because if Wikipedia dies, who will continue providing updated training data to these models? It's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy that consolidates without financial replacement.

The same sources Wikipedia gets its information from. You can not even contribute to Wikipedia without providing outside sources, I think, which are usually websites or books

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?

>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.

You favorite tool can easily answer that question

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Something isn’t right here; thread notif problems should have been solved a year or so ago.

And most apps are not element forks - eg FluffyChat, Nheko, Cinny are all great fully featured apps and separate codebases. The only Element fork i can think of is SchildiChat. Meanwhile matrix-react-sdk doesn’t even exist any more.

Are you on a stale build for some reason?

> FluffyChat, Nheko, Cinny are all great fully featured apps and separate codebases

Ok, I was mistaken about everything being an Element fork.

To move the goalposts slightly though --- do any of these apps properly support threads (i.e. messages in threads show up in and only in separate views)?

Afaik Element Web (and the legacy Element mobile apps) are the only ones which have done threads so far, perhaps because the notif problems you mentioned put off the others. These have been fixed now, but others (even Element X) have yet to catch up.

Correct notifications are essential for a messaging app/service.

If people hit those bugs, I hope some of them have the time to speak up in the Matrix channel for that app/platform or find/create/bump the Github issue for it. While Matrix needs continued love, its ecosystem seems like a great protocol & app to keep supporting with feedback.

Messaging apps are hard to get all perfect (even some major ones, not naming names), and what Matrix accomplishes is pretty impressive; I hope Matrix & Element will continue to mature. (For hope, the first iPhone was pretty limited and easy to dis, but look at it now.)

I am having many "Waiting for this message", usually from the same users, and I never get them... I have no idea why this happens to me.

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.

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

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.

Someone will come, and, for me at least, it is ok if it’s fewer people than what would come on mass reach platform

[dead]

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

No, those aren't the only viewpoints on the site. Twitter's got leftists, rightists, uninformed randos, journalists, shitposters, everything. Skip "trending," for sure, but the algorithm is pretty good at giving you what you want to see.

I think some people were just so used to only seeing one type of opinion over and over which confirmed and/or formed their biases and now that Twitter/X was liberated they can't comprehend that their worldview is just one of many and in many cases when allowed people have easily poked holes in it. It's difficult for people to accept that they've possibly been wrong about things, or at the least have their beliefs challenged and not have an authority to appeal to that will make dissent go away.

I do think leaving Twitter because you don't want to be on a corporate social media network is a valid reason though. But Bluesky isn't that. It's just safespace 2.0.

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.

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.

HackerNews is commercial. Beware of sampling bias.

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

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

> If only there was a pattern we could detect

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

[flagged]

This is like saying “the people who run email are insufferable”.

Why move away from X?

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern

Or you die, if you are interested in long-term availability of your work. It's nice to have it hosted somewhere where others will look after it.

> Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live.

How about this approach? https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/

And frankly, if you're not a business, there's no reason to chase a 100% uptime.

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

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.

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.

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-...

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.

Great wiki link thanks for sharing.

Also commenting to reiterate that if one spends just a little time (with an open mind) in any of the camps (X/Mastodon/Bluesky, whatever) its just so obvious that while the messages differ, the behaviors are exactly the same.

In most contexts we prefer consensus - its just more energy efficient! Your brain is going to expend more energy critically listening and rewiring thoughts when new evidence is presented. Its hard even for the best of us.

Pillarisation from a modeling perspective is interesting. I wonder if that could be codified at a legal level, and then anyone running for public positions of power would be required to have their own media algorithms curated by the public.

it wont work well bc ppl need enemies to fight for engagement. without that ppl just get bored

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

I'm not on Twitter. And the jury is still out on BlueSky.

I'm happy to abandon BlueSky though as soon as it is revealed to be a shitsocket.

Pre-Elon moderation was (somewhat) sensible. Every online space needs a janitorial crew to keep it from turning into a wasteland (look at 4chan /b/, and even b isn't completely unmoderated). But it didn't take actions at the emotional whims of a megalomaniac ruler.

It took actions based on the emotional / political whims of various random people though, right? Maybe not from a single megalomaniacal ruler, but that seems like a distinction without a difference.

The funny thing is that if you filter by the most active posters, I believe Twitter now very possibly (I'd even say likely) has a higher ratio of far-right posters than 4chan /b/ currently does.

Being far-right is not what made /b/ a wasteland, so that doesn't surprise me at all.

It certainly doesn't seem to so far.

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

Also a very lazy approach.

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.

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

"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...

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.

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

I think HN qualifies as a social media, a lot of it is user-generated. I do use some of them as I don't want to live as a total outcast.

If I could "draw the line", I'd probably start by banning all forms of for-profit social media.

This is the best comment on this thread: I hope others answer your question.

IMHO HN is social media, in fact the ONLY social media where I read the posts and comments, oftimes more informative and interesting than the posts.

I post to X many times daily but that's all I do there, using it as a sort of commonplace book/journal.

I never bother looking at my feed.

Do you think that a big part of that could be the financial incentive to be "popular" on Twitter?

I mean, on hacker news it doesn't seem like a person gains any long term advantage from having their posts engaged with and upvoted. That is to say, the focus is on the content and not on the profiles/usernames.

There is no explicit advertising and most content is posted to create interesting discussion about it.

For me, the idea of twitter style micro blogging itself is a turn off. I always thought the arbitrary character limit was inherently a bad idea and "threads" are a terrible solution. Threads force one to split up a message and allow pieces of it to be taken out of context, retweeted and even quoted. Threads are a great propaganda tool because with every follow up "part", engagement decreases. People see the first part of a thread and only look at that, social behavior that can be abused when posting. Even it's main feature set is antithetical to accurately publishing information. It gets much worse when official institutions use it as their official communications channel and a login gate is in place.

I actually don't even think this is malicious but moreso bad design and failure to anticipate what rhe platform could turn into when it was first conceived.

No financial incentive at all for me on Twitter.

> 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"?

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.

That's obviously not what I meant. Communication on current social media has only led us into a new era of populism, and seems to only worsen political polarization. Unless something changes, I will continue to think it does more harm than good.

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.

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.

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

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.

yeah that's the story that I read a lot. But it doesn't make sense. E.g. I don't use Twitter because it's just a shitshow (e.g. even before Musk took over). Of course the algorithm from Twitter doesn't see it like that because it never analyzed me. It only analyzes those who are there not those who are not there. Thus, there's a hole in their algorithm. Or in other words: It's a short-termin optimizing algo (for those who are already there), not a long-term optimizer (long-term user growth).

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

> there isn't moderation of any kind

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

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.

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.

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.

Fair enough, the only way I see feasible would be to use the Nostr protocol in a "walled garden"-type app/ecosystem, to the point where few users would know they're using Nostr (which would sacrifice most of the benefits of the protocol).

The global feed for me has always been generally as you say it is, with just as much unfettered content coming from Nostr-native pubkeys as from ones bridged from AT/AP/RSS etc. I thought that was just a consequence of me connecting to 30+ relays of varying sizes at all times, as nowadays I would suspect that the norm is to be subscribed to only a select few of the biggest relays.

I really do hope WoT gains traction, as for users it's a great middle ground between follows (easy filtering of feed, discoverability very difficult) and the global feed (easy discoverability, feed filtering very difficult).

Yes, it seems WoT is working fairly well since it is rare (ever?) to see spammers or trollers in recent times albeit is certain that they keep posting.

The downside is that newcomers have a really hard time to be noticed or followed, discoverability isn't yet at a good middle ground at the moment like you mention.

Let's hope a better algorithm can provide that balance. Every now and then it helps to view the global feed and push newcomers there to have feedback and follow them when the content is interesting.

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.

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Are you claiming that it's not possible to use bluesky without running into such content?

I've been using it since early on in the invite era and have yet to come across it at all. Just like with Twitter, I only look at the feed showing me the people I follow. On neither site am I forced to see content I don't want to see.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Show me something without ideology

I hear you but we're not asking anyone to be free of ideological assumptions—just to avoid denunciatory rhetoric, internet indignation tropes, name-calling, etc., in comments here. That's not hard, assuming you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and want to use HN in the intended spirit.

Btw, the reason for asking to avoid these things is not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with them. It's just that they evoke worse from others and put the threads into a doom spiral. That's the default outcome on the internet, so we're pretty proactive about trying to avoid it. If you find HN interesting enough to be here, then it's in your interest to contribute to that intention, since the default outcome (a.k.a. scorched earth) won't be interesting to anybody.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. That's what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair.