Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)
I think that we absolutely need more of this as this gives the users ownership over their identity. Right now, if the New York Times wants to get verified on social media they rely on the platform to do so. With this it would be their own choice.
DNS is really not a good platform to build personal identity on.
For 99.9% of users this is a not at all simple.
This is why Mastodon instances should be run by user-owned nonprofit cooperatives so that there's accountability on the day to day operations to the people who depend on it and there's policies around continuity of service. This doesn't have to be hard, and it already fits into existing legal frameworks.
Add a few meta tags to your website homepage, use that homepage as your "identity" to log in to websites, and they'd up your configured identity provider to do the login & request name/email/whatever else. You weren't locked in to a particular provider, since you logged in as _your_ webpage and could change the meta tags to point to a different provider.
This isn't unlike running your blog and I'm pretty sure there are solutions like WordPress.com that run it for you with your domain.
You are always leasing it, and if the registry decide to jack the price, remove your domain or give it to someone else they can (usually with some level of self-imposed rules). The ruls vary between gTLDs and ccTLDs, but believing you "own" a domain can be a dangerous assumption.
So run your own instance?
in fact, when corporations try to own their domain space authentication, they have to buy hundreds of lookalike domains to avoid imposters.
I have to be honest, I can think of many far bigger issues with social media, namely, bullying, harassment, misinformation, and addiction, among others
The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
I was still naively thinking in terms of redirects from your old instance to your new one, but that's not going to help you if your old instance vanishes in thin air.
Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope.
Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
These three words evoke PTSD in me as hearing it means promotion is no-go again.
Lot of feedback originally was common people won't bother to buy domain and integrate with BlueSky, so this is great that they are doing this.
I don't know if domains are the way either, but at least they're a name reservation system that's established and works. At the current price of a domain, it comes down to $1 a month, which is a great value if you can use it to identify yourself with, authenticate, authorize and own your own digital identity.
It can also be cheaper, because if this is a mass service for every person out there, scale will reduce some of the cost.
The great advantage of this workflow is that it minimises damage in event of service shutdown or malicious actors.
By maintaining discrete identities for each service you are compartmentalising and building resilience. It also provides a first layer of privacy, since it becomes more difficult for a malicious actor to correlate identities across services.
For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many/most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight.
Crowning whichever one can "move faster and break things" as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms.
Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.
if threads get hundred million people in a short period and they start to write and interact with each other then that a good moat for them.
Might be that BlueSky is not trying to be a popular social media platform. But if they want to then having right now their signup closed is a very bad decision.
It is already hard to keep track of where each discussion is: twitter, mastodon, instagram, facebook, linkedin ...
I think people are maybe trying one more from what they currently have.
look at Clubhouse - they tried the invitation idea and died with it in their hands. When having so many platforms available almost no one waits for yet another one for 3 months to get their handle to finally talk with 10%of their existing network as their other 90% still waits their invitation.
It's still alive. But it's specifically them scaling up that killed their relevance because it turned out social audio was even better as a place for bullies and extremists than it is as an exclusive popular person hangout.
The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.
So the old Slashdot moderation system, only with multiple layers?
But even with that said, I thought "Bluesky" seemed perfectly fine as a name. It's perhaps tying itself a bit to being an "escape" or "clean start" (implicitly "from twitter", now that many people are dissatisfied with Elon's leadership), but nobody is going to forget that aspect of the social media landscape for a while, so I don't think it's a problem.
This is the type of feature / partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch.
Wouldn't it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?
Why? The high sensitivity domains that are most likely to want to be verified via the (mildly confusing) domain-to-user mapping on Bluesky already exist. To take your example, Apple is not likely to try and register iphone.apple.com on Namecheap.
On the other hand, "normal" users who just want to chat with their friends are not going to care, and might actually be a little confused by this announcement. "Wait, I need to buy a domain to use Bluesky?"
Now, I could be wrong, and Bluesky might be trying to get a bunch of high-flying corporate accounts on board first. In that case, they are doing the right thing, and I look forward to when large media orgs start posting on Bluesky.
Wat.
Not exactly. They can't even show you full timelines: https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.xyz/post/3jzsdcorxx42n
They rushed to market.
Most people want this though. They don't just want to see people they follow, they want to be served an endless stream of takes and fight videos
Otherwise I'm impressed with the launch and its sheer scale, very smooth.
> The real test is not if we can build up a lot of hype, but if you all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time. And there are tons of basics that are missing: search, hashtags, a following feed, graph syncing, fedeverse support, messaging maybe…
It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot.
Threads is not an equivalent product.
That tends to happen when there's an exclusive club, people want to peak in. It is, in no way, an indication of the quality of the platform.
> the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features.
That tends to happen when there's hardly any users at all. The "repugnant" or "normals" will flock in all the same, if the platform ever takes off.
> the utter lack of ads is delightful.
That tends to happen in all pre-revenue startups. Twitter was ads-free for years.
Maybe it'll all be the usual grim broken carnival barking shit when you have an account too, but for right now we're all twirling in a teacup here.
Gotta have my filter bubble to protect me from 'misinformation.' At least this time it is crowdsourced so Jack doesn't even have to cooperate with any political campaigns.
Honest question: are they emulating "classical Twitter" to the extent of going with self-hosted inefficient Rails implementation? Or what is their problem with scaling exactly in 2023 beyond ordering more instances in some AWS gui?
Is it any surprise Facebook got this right? Understanding "it's cool because there are people there" is part of their origin story, after all.
The threads app can pull in millions in a day because they can login with Instagram SSO, zero friction.
poasters post where the consumers are, and vice versa. Threads is on its way to bootstrapping this network effect in a way bluesky never even began to scratch due to the invite system and niche appeal
Nobody is going to move again. They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.
Whatever they release now, will never get initial users to get it off ground.
And there’s more differences than just that, it’s a bit too soon to do a declaration of death I think
None of that matters if the people you follow are on Threads but aren’t on Bluesky. And if the people you follow can’t get on Bluesky even if they wanted to, then off to Threads they will go and so everybody else will follow.
And the algorithm definitely changes once you start following more people.
Mine for example is chronological with the occasional recommended person in it.
I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
Seems pretty clear typical users don't care about decentralization, verification for themselves, or algorithm customization at all. They just want to post and look at nonsense.
I'm not sure what will become of Bluesky, but I don't think it'll the Twitter replacement. Seems more like a classic case of developing for power users instead of typical ones.
But give any competent engineer and friend 8 million, and they'll build you a Twitter on steroids in 6 months.
Dorsey couldn't manage get a head start even with all that? If anything I'd think he was a CEO that gets easily distracted by the next shiny thing (Square, crypto, Nostr), which really doesn't bode well for Bluesky.
I will wait to try Bluesky. If it dies before I get the chance, then I won’t be using anything at all. Threads is not an option.
My timeline on Bsky somehow always show people taking a dig at other rivals, and self congratulations. People regularly diss twitter, Mastodon and now the feed is full of people dissing on Threads. This bsky-is-not-twitter identity that bsky network latches onto will be detrimental to itself.
Also there are no federated servers anywhere in sight so far.
In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the "correctness" of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the "town square" functionality which is core to these platforms' ethos.
If you desire light hearted discussion, I suggest avoiding nonresponsive arguments and implications of pseudointellectualism.
Threads for the status-seekers Spill for hip folks Truth Social for alt-right Bluesky for the cozy web Mastodon for the true geeks
So on and so on...and that's a good thing.
People switch when other people switch, generally. Those tired of Twitter now have an easy place to call home, there's not going to be any momentum to then want to switch again.
Mastodon tried, and did get some following, but IMO is too complicated in concept for the common user. Bsky on the other hand just blew it.
In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
so no, bluesky isn't as dead as you may think. if anything it's gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.
Extremely bitter about that ~17 years later. Extremely.
It was tied to my leftover MSDN account from when I worked at MS, so at that point it was no more free legal MS downloads for me :(
You can also add funds to your account in advance, just got an email suggesting that for an upcoming renewal.
Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that.
I'd argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we're part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the "domain administrators" and the people who associate with them.
The right answer isn't to atomise identity (that's technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation's board, committees, or key executive positions.
We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.
This was such a missed opportunity by the community, because app.net was the best implementation of a Twitter alternative ever made. Better than Bluesky, better than Mastodon, better than Threads, etc.
I quit Twitter in 2012 and joined app.net. It was great! But not enough people did that to make app.net last. I still think about what we could have had instead of the current lineup of crap. :-(
> Not in terms of control but in terms of floating the idea of paying an annual subscription fee.
Where did you see that, other than the general idea of "paid services"?
The content on Bluesky is lacking, i know it’s because of the invite only system, and that has its advantages and disadvantages but Bluesky is going to run into a problem soon.
They obviously need content and users to stay alive, and the content is lacking. Currently it’s a very niche group of users who have a very distinct culture. They don’t leave much room for differing ideas.
It will be interesting watching this play out. They are positioned in a way that can beat threads, but they need to drop the invite ASAP and manage their onboarding of new users.
That means the culture will inevitably change, I’m not sure I see a way of it staying the same as normal people and more fringe people sign up.
IMO they should prioritize content creators. Engaging content on the platform that’s rich will be a huge leg up when they open up.
Helps too that currently i can’t even post a picture on threads without it crashing. Blue sky is definitely the more delightful sop to use.
1. At Meta, you had to use internal "approved" tooling to build you product. which is far worse than products in open market. BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day.
2. If funds are an issue, then raise more. There's no way around it. you had to scale sometime. Even if you optimise well, you'll still burn a huge amount supporting free users.
3. Threads was built by 10 Engineers. A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways.
I feel the founders are largely responsible for not having their priorities sorted out.
> If funds are an issue, then raise more.
This is exactly the cancer that’s eating most modern services. Burn money, raise money, burn money, have investors holding you by the balls demanding profitability over a massively expensive inefficient system, shove ads everywhere, degrade experience. Add more haphazard money-pit feature to drive value. Burn more money. Rinse and repeat.
> A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways
This is true, but not for a social media app that’s expecting (or wanting) hundreds of millions of free non-paying users. Opening the floodgates, then optimizing after the fact worked in the 2000s, but it doesn’t work today. It’s a good way to repeat and be stuck in the cycle above.
I hope BlueSky doesn’t go in the way of Okuna(and lot of similar ones before it).
Really, if you want a consistent, permanent ID, we might as well use our government IDs everywhere...
I've tried the selfhostable pds and its definitely looking good, the ability to selfhost our data ourselves. Plus like the article promoted, the ability to link username to our own domain name.
> Bluesky offers an additional layer of privacy protection by acting as your domain registrar agent. We do not register your personal information with the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership.
So is Bluesky the registrant of these domains, not the end-user?
Edited for clarity
It’s unclear to me who is the registrant in this scenario.
If blue sky then you don’t own anything and there is no portability.
If you are the registrant that’s great but namecheap is going to need contact information that’s verifiable which may turn people off who would like a bit more separation on their social profiles. I also wonder does blue sky see that registrant data? Can’t say I like that very much.
Honestly all these social media apps like Twitter suck. I never used Twitter nor social media much, probably won’t change.
Personally, I’m out. Y’all have fun and enjoy.
Hopefully someone else here can give you one and set you up today :)
but really, Bluesky users have spent the past two months going wild with novelty domain names. You can pay $1 for the first year for all manner of stupid funny names, and people do.
For anyone here that would be easy - but for non-techies you can see the use case for a service that does it for them.
This really is just providing a convenient service that this specific userbase demonstrably wants.
If anyone else wanted to do the same they could, nobody's stopping you. But this is an actual service for Bluesky's users.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/bluesky-announces-its-8m-s...
I'd actually look at this, at least you get something for your money, than can be used elsewhere
