Social platforms like BlueSky have radically different design constraints than direct messaging applications. The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns.
Social DMs are bad. Try not to use them!
Which are...?
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
I think nowadays we can substitute email with chat/DM.
What's lacking for me now is video. Having to share through YouTube and then embed for just small daily clips is a bit cumbersome.
The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.
Nostr has it right where servers/instances are completely interchangeable and all the hard work is done by the client.
I get why Mastodon had servers at the beginning - because browsers can't speak any other protocol than HTTP towards a single origin domain name. But this limitation fundamentally constrained the entire product into a corner that's very hard/impossible to back out of.
Mastodon should've been Nostr in the first place, with "instances" just being read-only views into the network (to satisfy browser's "demand" for an HTTP endpoint), but otherwise would be disposable and interchangeable - all write actions would be made by a client that doesn't have the constraints of a browser and can interact with the decentralized network over an appropriate protocol (and do the necessary cryptographic magic to ensure those peers are trustless and interchangeable).
The concept of "instances" not only introduces many user experience problems that makes it a non-starter for non-technical people (or even technical people who just don't have the time/willingness to deal with BS) but also open the door for politically-motivated feuds between instance admins to which the users are held hostage (instead of moderation being done on the client where the user is the only one in control of which "moderation feeds" they subscribe to, similar to an ad blocker list).
Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to.
Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.
You need to recreate your own centralized cyberspace and then build the underground path to the decentralized canyon.
Then provide a mothership allowing others to dock of their own standards and protocols. Yet allowing them to take off at their own accord with the data of the centralized hub.
That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph.
I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.
Petty tyrants try to ruin everything.
On Bluesky, there are art feeds for every kind of interest. I've used Mastodon since near the beginning and really only stick around for the small cohort of instances mine is in. It's increasingly all crossposts from Bluesky.
>> "If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph."
It took a while but I'm convinced they're sincerely working toward account portability. I can at least already point my domain at another PDS even if getting at my posts would be a sketchy, probably very technical operation with command lines and scripts. (For now)
These are people who've been working on decentralized social media for as long as it's been a thing (and newer people who share the goal), and it's hard to ignore the dedication to that goal once you look into their histories.
[0] https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html
I (actually not my personal but a project account) had to move servers because the original server had been blocked by other admins because of a fairly interminable dispute about whether one user had been racist (it was far from clear cut from what I could tell from the brief time I spent digging into it).
How is this positive? It seemed to spell out a future where Mastodon split into islands based on long-forgotten generational disputes.
I want one network with a clean way to choose who I see and who interacts with me. I don't want other people making this decisions on my behalf.
Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered.
The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.
From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn't work well globally.
To me it seems like Mastodon's focus on hashtags as discovery mechanism won hard in this space thus allowing such diverse communities to thrive on the platform.
The other big reason I went with Bluesky over Mastadon is that several of the people I used to follow on Twitter have moved over to Bluesky.
Oh interesting. This is a really cool feature. It kinda nudges it in the direction of being a private, self-run micro-blogging platform, where replies are essentially comments that you can moderate.
2/3 of top 3 and half of top 10-20 Mastodon instances(not including Misskey ActivityPub servers) are Japanese. They really don't like that.
Cutting out the Nazis from Twitter is a great start, but Mastodon has done this by simply doubling down on the other end of the horseshoe. It's Truth Social for the other fringe.
BlueSky seems somewhat richer in normal people, but that probably won't last if the platform is successful over time. It seems in the nature of social networks to be taken over by parasitic outrage grifters.
Slow clap for Bluesky.
I don't think https://tweetnacl.cr.yp.to/ is hard to mess up. Similar to the interior of a furry suit, you won't know what is going on in there.
They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)
I'm not sure there are any non-bluesky Relays
I know folks are hosting their own labellers.
and I know folks are hosting their own appviews
I've seen repeated kerfuffles about people running mastodon-bluesky bridges
Now that federation is enabled in the public network, I've been working on a slightly more production-ready rewrite[1], although it's not yet in a usable state (haven't had much time to work on it lately)
So all the money, all the development, to create Twitter² and they just added DMs?
That seems an underwhelming achievement.
It would be something no other platform has managed. Including this site.
Musk’s transformation may have made it exponentially worse, but for some people it was already very bad.
Less my thing, but if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you.
Signing up went really well. Mastodon absolutely fumbled the Twitter disaster because it was difficult for non-technical people to figure out what to do. Bluesky just looks like Twitter unless you're actively looking for options to be on another server.
> if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you.
Same could be said for Mastodon, plus retrocomputing and a lot of tech people who don’t want to be on Musk’s Nazi bar anymore. Compiler folks and John Mashey hang out on Mastodon.
If you follow US politics, you do want to be on BS, though. Mastodon is better for international politics and stuff like Eurovision.
when openai launched gpt-4o and google had its i/o, the two events didn't make a dent in the bsky trends. what did make a big dent was eurovision. that says a lot about the population of tech people.
I mean, sure if you want to run a PDS or labeller, that's basically technical folks only at this point, but I've seen non-technical people put together feeds, choose which labellers they want to pay attention to, etc.
but for just skeeting and BMing, it's user friendly
> We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy.
The alternatives are to:
1. Wait a bit longer for something half-baked that appears to meet the goals (i.e., something you're going to regret but will be unable to replace). 2. Wait even longer for something perfect.
By making the protocol centralized and stupid-simple, it's also stupid-simple to replace in when everyone is done painting the perfect bikeshed.
But we all know that the more temporary the fix, the more permanent it becomes.
Can you recall any example of anyone replacing a centralized protocol with a decentralized one?
And they have added ActivityPub integration moving everything closer to decentralisation.
Given how much of a win-win for Meta it is it wouldn't surprise me to see all their networks move in that direction.
Spam prevention is much harder if the server can't see the message. Spam reporting can be done with sufficient effort, but stopping the known spam from reaching the user in the first place is impossible (the closest you can get is a client-side scan before actually showing the message to the user, which requires downloading the whole message just to show "number of incoming messages" indicator or else having the indicator lie).
And of course, E2EE is a lie if you're visiting a website anyway.
Either E2EE is something you "upgrade" an existing conversation into (only after both sides consent to the conversation); or E2EE is something that only inherently establishes once both sides have sent one-another a message; or E2EE is something you can only enable before you start a conversation, if you already have the other person's public key (which you only get when you request to add them as a contact, and they accept.)
I think schemes like this balance privacy with spam-prevention quite well: privacy-conscious people can explicitly add each-other before either person says anything / can send intentional small-talk as pairing messages; while everyone else gets the benefit of a central spam-filter sitting between them and messages from strangers.
So, they want the experience to be like Twitter for the users that don’t care about decentralization, but to be backed by something like ATProto underneath for those who care.
I’d say Mastodon is more “the entire point is that it’s decentralized”. Bluesky it’s a major point, but not the entire point.
They're not targeting the average customer (by whatever metric you measure an average customer). They're targeting people that value decentralization.
Nobody cares about protocols, except maybe the handful of infosec nerds on Mastodon. It's about a middle school-level rearranging of friend groups. A VIP lounge where they only hang out with their own.
There was an exodus of a small subset of users, and BlueSky was there like an abandoned building that was squatted. It being invite-only added to the exclusivity as invites were passed amongst like-minded peers online, further adding to the echo-chamber.
Censorship is bad, but amplification of horrible takes is not equivalent the absence of censorship.
The quality of ads (I was using the official client) was also quickly approaching the quality of predatory late-night TV shopping channels (“call NOW to get our ULTRA LINT REMOVER with free shipping!!!”).
Sorry, but I think that deliberately obfuscates the changes Musk has made at Twitter. See https://ketanjoshi.co/2024/04/19/you-are-the-fuel-that-energ... for one summary.
So two decades later, when we now have so many widely available open source libraries for networking and encryption, that job is somehow too hard for a well-funded organization like Bluesky? That's very sad.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Eavesdropping...
The trouble isn't the encryption. It's, how do you make it feel seamless without having access to the private keys, and without asking the end user for their private key.
Yes, I know there's plenty of reasons you'll nitpick twitter and I can nitpick bluesky as well.
More competition is good and I like to see it. Go where your friends are and have a good time.
If you want the edge of Ai/ML, I suggest twitter. Lots of world class accounts. Bluesky is good, has more old school... like 'harry potter' type nerds on it. They post interesting stuff. You should also have a discord. Maybe an insta if you're trying to get a gf
It's really not. It was good for a short while, way before the Muskquisition but the quality both of the service and of discourse have declined.
firefox is my default browser, and i have the enhanced tracking protection to strict.
Nostr is much better positioned to take on these large platforms IMO. You can build pretty much any social experience on it.
Here's a selection of things folks have built on top of the protocol: https://www.nostrapps.com
If someone said, "I'm on Nostr," and I wanted to join them, then I found that page you linked to... now what? What is a Zap? Is this some kind of crypto nonsense? "amount in sats"... what's a sat? I just went to what was supposed to be a reddit clone and there were 0 posts. Another one is just a chess board. What is this supposed to be, the user asked? I'm already annoyed by this. "Here are 90 sites, go find the 1 that might not be a ghost town that will also let you talk to your friends." This is a bad first impression, and it's not even my first time hearing about it.
The public will never be sold on a protocol, there needs to be that one killer app that brings people in, and if the protocol is flexible to allow for more things, great.
Hard pass. Why would I ever want my wallet to be social? What does a social network have to do with Bitcoin? This sounds like social media for insufferable crypto bros.
99% of social media on the English-speaking web is basically American politics obsessed, if you don't want that you need to branch out to other languages.
It's less due to politics and more due to the rotten business models of all mainstream social media - it encourages engagement (algorithmically, so it doesn't even need human intention/decisions), it just turns out that political content is great at generating engagement and thus it floats to the top.
Various actors take advantage of this for various reasons (including political motivations) but the underlying problem is that the platform itself will promote any content as long as it generates engagement.
While they’re building out, keeping it exclusive and taking their sweet-ass time, something else will come along and eat their lunch.
I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO.
You'll be pleased to learn that Bluesky sign-up has been open to all without invitation since last February.
It already happened.
Whilst Bluesy was requiring invites, Threads launched and now has the highest DAUs of all of the text social networks.
