55 points | by srameshc5 hours ago
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-thinkin...
I've seen an instance where an innocent user added to a blocklist that blocks Nazi ideology or something like that.
Honestly if that happened to me, I'd quit Bluesky instantly
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
You might be responding to a spreader of disinformation with facts, but if they then block you, no-one else will be able to read your response.
if alice blocks bob: it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021 for more detail.
A relevant comment from that issue:
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
Marketing.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
¹ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-...
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can’t rely on them.
What’s the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking away. Just do it.
Call it "left leaning" in that it's critical of the historically high imbalance of wealth and media capture that the literal right wing _currently has_ and is _currently consolidating_.
Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain people (like Farcaster) — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).