I think Bluesky is doing a good job at running a microblogging site (as far as I can tell). They seem to have good moderation. I like the design of the website and the app. The decentralization...
Exemplary
I think Bluesky is doing a good job at running a microblogging site (as far as I can tell). They seem to have good moderation. I like the design of the website and the app. The decentralization strikes a good balance between usability and "forkability" (credible exit).
That said, I think microblogging is just fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, it's all fundamentally the same idea for a social network and it all suffers from the same problems. Maybe, theoretically, someone could create a microblogging platform that is different. But it hasn't happened yet. (And the problem isn't investors, money, financial incentives, ownership, centralization, a lack of federation, a lack of customization options for users, or minor design decisions that could be fixed with a few tweaks, but the general idea of a microblogging platform as we understand it today.)
I quit Twitter in early 2021 and it was a great decision. It reduced my anxiety. It freed up my mind to focus on better things. It felt like turning off a noisy radio. Only in the silence afterward could I appreciate how much it had been grating on my nerves.
Ezra Klein has a beautiful polemic against Twitter in this podcast at 38:15. (The podcast is from December 2022.) He talks about why he quit Twitter and why we shouldn't want a Twitter alternative like Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky. He's talked more about this in later podcasts and also in a few New York Times columns. In one column, he writes:
Twitter forces nuanced thoughts down to bumper-sticker bluntness. The chaotic, always moving newsfeed leaves little time for reflection on whatever has just been read. The algorithm’s obsession with likes and retweets means users mainly see (and produce) speech that flatters their community or demonizes those they already loathe. The quote tweet function encourages mockery rather than conversation. The frictionless slide between thought and post, combined with the absence of an edit function, encourages impulsive reaction rather than sober consideration. It is not that difficult conversations cannot or have not happened on the platform. It is more that they should not happen on the platform.
Ev Williams, who co-founded Twitter and later founded Medium, once said in an interview that Twitter was like the limbic system — fast, twitchy, noisy, knee-jerk, reflexive, impulsive — and he wanted Medium to be more like the pre-frontal cortex — slow, quiet, reflective, considered. Initially, Medium didn't even have the ability to leave comments on posts, which I believe was a deliberate design decision to encourage reading and thinking, rather than reacting.
I don't know if anyone has quite cracked what good online platforms should be like. A few aspects I think are important:
-A focus on longer-form content. The maximum length of a tweet is 280 characters (or at least it used to be). In my view, a good social network will have many posts that are 5x, 10x, or 20x longer than this. I think blogging and newsletter platforms like Medium and Substack are sort of on the right track. There are also some niche forums where it's normalized to write blog-length posts.
-Really strict moderation and community norms around respect and kindness. In practice, this is hard to achieve. I've moderated several different kinds of online communities from small to large. It's incredibly hard. But we have to try, otherwise what's the point of any of it? I feel like the status quo is that online life is so nasty it poisons our real relationships because we take that nastiness off the computer and into our real lives. What if it could be the reverse? What if online communities made kindness the norm to the extent it encouraged us to be softer in our real life relationships?
-An experience centred around forming relationships and community with people, in which you gain familiarity with people over time. (Clearly visible profile pictures and different coloured usernames can help with this!) Think small Twitch and Discord communities (Slack used to be used for small communities sometimes too, but now it's pretty much all Discord), small or medium forums, and online games with small communities. The opposite, which we want to avoid, is an overwhelming, chaotic flood of content, in which you can't keep track of what's happening and you might not even realize if you encountered the same person twice. Think Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. Ultimately, we want to slow down the pace of information consumption (and the speed of reaction), humanize people, and create conditions that foster the growth of one-to-one human connection over time.
I don't think the primary obstacle to building online platforms that have these properties is that big tech companies have bad ethics, bad management, or bad incentives. The barrier to entry to creating new online platforms and new online communities is fairly low. Network effects and coordination problems make things harder, sure. But I ultimately see this as an innovation problem, or a creativity problem. Or a design problem, or a research problem — however you want to categorize it. The problem is a lack of good ideas about what to do.
I think I'm writing the same thing each time there's a post about Bluesky on Tildes... Their marketing team did an awesome job at selling a "decentralized" platform that isn't decentralized at...
I think I'm writing the same thing each time there's a post about Bluesky on Tildes... Their marketing team did an awesome job at selling a "decentralized" platform that isn't decentralized at all.
The decentralization strikes a good balance between usability and "forkability" (credible exit).
From your "credible exit" link:
This is also part of the "credible exit" mechanism where users can theoretically switch to a different host while keeping all of their existing content
Also of note: direct messages on Bluesky are currently entirely dependent on the single central node run by Bluesky themselves
So, users could theoretically switch to a different host, once Bluesky will no longer be dependant on a central node. See? ✨Decentralized!✨
Yeah, it's not even remotely decentralized. Mastodon and other "fediverse" apps are, but in some ways this is also their downfall - asking people to make an uninformed decision about which server...
Yeah, it's not even remotely decentralized. Mastodon and other "fediverse" apps are, but in some ways this is also their downfall - asking people to make an uninformed decision about which server to join before they can participate is a hurdle.
Yes, to a lot of us, this isn't hard. But for the typical smartphone user, it's a pretty big extra step over just downloading an app. And there isn't just one app. There's choices there too.
I understand why bluesky is doing well. But it's disappointing that they make this claim of being decentralized when it's a lie.
As an aside, the internet itself already has the framework to be decentralized, and it was for a long time. Anyone can spin up a server and share files, blog posts, etc. It was nice when the only "algorithm" involved was just directory sites and word of mouth. But I also acknowledge that having massive platforms provides an easier connection to audiences for businesses of all kinds (including small ones).
You can read like 50,000 words of exchanges between developers discussing/debating how decentralized Bluesky is, if you really want to get into the weeds:...
You can read like 50,000 words of exchanges between developers discussing/debating how decentralized Bluesky is, if you really want to get into the weeds:
I have only read bits of it because it’s incredibly long and I don’t have a dog in this fight anyway. As I said in my comment above, I think microblogging is a deeply troubled idea and most of us would probably be better off quitting it all, regardless of how decentralized or centralized any of the platforms are.
One observation, though: Bluesky is actually decentralized in an important way Mastodon isn’t. Mastodon doesn’t allow yourself to migrate your posts from one Mastodon instance to another. AT Protocol, which Bluesky is based on, is designed to allow that.
When mastodon.lol, one of the biggest and most widely recommended Mastodon instances, shut down, the 12,000 people who were unfortunate enough to have signed up there had no way to migrate their posts anywhere else. That’s such a bummer.
I think I had only posted a handful of times there and I only found out about the instance shutting down after it happened. There was no way to migrate my posts or my accounts, or even to see what I had posted. Not a big loss for me, personally, but it does reveal a weakness in the Mastodon model.
The claim that Bluesky “isn’t decentralized at all” or that Bluesky’s decentralization is “a lie” seems, to me, like it doesn’t really engage with the complexity of the topic.
IMO it's actually quite simple: do you need a central authority (bsky.app) to post on Bluesky? If yes, it's centralized. If you need a whole essay to explain "well it's ackshually decentralized if...
IMO it's actually quite simple: do you need a central authority (bsky.app) to post on Bluesky? If yes, it's centralized. If you need a whole essay to explain "well it's ackshually decentralized if we use that very carefully crafted definition of the word", it's not decentralized. At that point, my personal website is decentralized because the database is hosted on another server.
I'll consider it decentralized when I'm able to self-host it, and when Bluesky will be resilient enough to function without its central node.
If you use the right software (not the default), you don’t need it to post. However, nobody will see your post unless the centralized relay picks it up. It would be like a website that isn’t...
If you use the right software (not the default), you don’t need it to post. However, nobody will see your post unless the centralized relay picks it up. It would be like a website that isn’t indexed.
Alternative relays are being worked on.
So the short answer is “no, not yet. But maybe in a year?”
I don’t have a dog in this fight because I’m not interested in using microblogging services in general, regardless of whether they’re fully decentralized, fully centralized, or something in...
I don’t have a dog in this fight because I’m not interested in using microblogging services in general, regardless of whether they’re fully decentralized, fully centralized, or something in between.
I will say that I find your mocking tone frustrating. I am now shut down from hearing your opinion on things because your approach is so hardline and combative.
Sorry, the mocking tone was only directed at Bluesky, and not at you. It's just a result of my personal frustration (as I feel bsky is continuously being "sold" as something it's not). Though...
Sorry, the mocking tone was only directed at Bluesky, and not at you. It's just a result of my personal frustration (as I feel bsky is continuously being "sold" as something it's not).
Though you're right, I communicated poorly. Sorry about that.
This is disappointing, and I doubt that will change because it seems to be by design. (Disclaimer: I am not attempting to minimize that no migration functionality sucks in a lot of ways.) I would...
Mastodon doesn’t allow yourself to migrate your posts from one Mastodon instance to another.
This is disappointing, and I doubt that will change because it seems to be by design. (Disclaimer: I am not attempting to minimize that no migration functionality sucks in a lot of ways.)
I would imagine this has to do with giving you control of your own data, and honoring the privacy levels of others' posts. Migrating reposts and replies between servers could be tricky. Not only because you can put a granular permission level on each post, but because some instances block other instances and it would become a complex mess.
From a privacy perspective, losing your posts when your instance goes down is a good thing. It means you have the ability to remove your posts when you want to. (Obviously screenshots etc exist that wouldn't disappear if someone did that.) But for most users, it absolutely sucks and would likely turn some people off from mastodon forever if their host shut down.
I don’t know anything about designing protocols for decentralized social networks, but why is the AT Protocol that Bluesky is based on able to allow post migration but Mastodon/ActivityPub is not?
I don’t know anything about designing protocols for decentralized social networks, but why is the AT Protocol that Bluesky is based on able to allow post migration but Mastodon/ActivityPub is not?
Yes, Bluesky follows Twitter too closely for my taste. The 300 character limit irks me. But I wonder if the Bluesky infrastructure could be leveraged to create a different app with a more...
Yes, Bluesky follows Twitter too closely for my taste. The 300 character limit irks me.
But I wonder if the Bluesky infrastructure could be leveraged to create a different app with a more forum-like experience? You wouldn’t need to start from scratch with user accounts and per-user storage.
I’m wondering how to create a sense of place, like a subreddit? I guess there would need to be hosts and storage somewhere other than the users’ PDS.
Would a hashtag work as a subreddit substitute? You can filter posts by hashtag: https://bsky.app/hashtag/art What else is missing? A mechanism to follow/unfollow hastags?
I remember reading that sometimes, loose communities would form around hashtags on Twitter, but that hasn't been my experience. One difference between that and a subreddit is having some rules for...
I remember reading that sometimes, loose communities would form around hashtags on Twitter, but that hasn't been my experience.
One difference between that and a subreddit is having some rules for what should be posted and moderation, so off-topic stuff gets deleted.
Seems like what you're describing is just a fundamentally different type of website. Longer form content and community formation are exactly what I don't want from a microblogging site. In my...
Seems like what you're describing is just a fundamentally different type of website. Longer form content and community formation are exactly what I don't want from a microblogging site. In my opinion the best function of these types of sites is to share small bits of news, such as a food truck broadcasting its location or a sports writer breaking news about a player trade. A comments section detracts from the utility of microblogging. Forming communities and having discussions should be on other types of sites. I guess that was the original idea with Twitter, but wanting to drive engagement and user base ends up with a ton of feature creep.
I don’t know if you meant to reply to me or you meant to reply to skybrian and replied to me on accident. In the comment I wrote that you’re replying to, I said: If I had to guess, I would guess...
I don’t know if you meant to reply to me or you meant to reply to skybrian and replied to me on accident. In the comment I wrote that you’re replying to, I said:
I think microblogging is just fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, it's all fundamentally the same idea for a social network and it all suffers from the same problems.
If I had to guess, I would guess that most people’s lives would be improved on net if they stopped using microblogging platforms. I would also guess that the world would be improved on net if microblogging platforms stopped existing. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t need to know for sure, since that decision isn’t up to me.
When I was describing in my comment above what I want to see in an online platform, I was indeed, describing a fundamentally different type of online platform than a microblogging platform. (I think we should try to move past microblogging as an idea. Or, at least, I, personally, don’t want to use microblogging platforms anymore.)
No, I meant to reply to you. What I mean is that I think microblogging has utility, but as you say, there are parts that end up going bad. Things would be better if the functionality that enables...
No, I meant to reply to you. What I mean is that I think microblogging has utility, but as you say, there are parts that end up going bad. Things would be better if the functionality that enables those negatives (such as comment sections) were removed from the microblogging sites and discussion should happen on sites like the kind you are suggesting.
This doesn’t meet most of your wishlist but I stumbled onto Readup a while ago: https://readup.org/ It has the barest of social interaction. You can only comment on an article that you’ve read. It...
This doesn’t meet most of your wishlist but I stumbled onto Readup a while ago:
It has the barest of social interaction. You can only comment on an article that you’ve read. It must be very tiny because most articles have only a handful of reads. Anyway it’s calming compared to most sites or apps that have a social aspect.
My guess is that the requirement that readers install a browser extension to participate is putting some people off. I rarely install extensions, and certainly not for a website that I'm not sure...
My guess is that the requirement that readers install a browser extension to participate is putting some people off. I rarely install extensions, and certainly not for a website that I'm not sure I'll use.
IMHO, Mastodon was designed to solve many of these concerns. There's no "chaotic, always moving newsfeed", likes don't mater, you can't quote someone else's post, etc. There's also a fork called...
IMHO, Mastodon was designed to solve many of these concerns. There's no "chaotic, always moving newsfeed", likes don't mater, you can't quote someone else's post, etc. There's also a fork called hometown that allows longer posts if that's your thing.
For me, the main issue is having a single place where everyone is there and we expect that they'll all behave. I don't think anyone figured out yet a way of moderating at this scale.
The coolest part of Mastodon for me is that it feels like a small community where you can get to know each other, like Tildes, but you can still talk to the outside World. Assuming you find a cool community and don't just join the official one.
I see the premise of BlueSky as nearly fundamentally flawed. I don't want it to fail but I don't trust it not to. The only way I see for capitalist socialist media to avoid toxicity is to accept...
I see the premise of BlueSky as nearly fundamentally flawed. I don't want it to fail but I don't trust it not to.
The only way I see for capitalist socialist media to avoid toxicity is to accept that its ability to earn capital must be strictly constrained by boundaries separating it from toxicity. If venture cap is involved (and it is, with BS), those investors must be committed to those same boundaries. Otherwise, by way of demand for exponential ROI, enshittification, toxicity, is inevitable.
Therefore, BS will either run out of money or be forced to co-opt itself in service to its investors.
Even Google eventually sold out its "Don't be evil" values.
There is a silver lining here: If the venture capitalists involved realize that the vast majority of value proposed for users lies in the platform’s non-toxicity and being a viable alternative,...
There is a silver lining here: If the venture capitalists involved realize that the vast majority of value proposed for users lies in the platform’s non-toxicity and being a viable alternative, they could see that keeping it free of just that is worth more than just “higher number of users”.
The mistake here is assuming that venture capitalists care about value for users in the long run. They care about value for users only long enough to pump the user numbers, then they care about...
The mistake here is assuming that venture capitalists care about value for users in the long run. They care about value for users only long enough to pump the user numbers, then they care about revenue at the expense of users, then they care about how much they can sell it for at IPO, and then at that point it's not their problem anymore.
Execs similarly are compensated based on what the market did this quarter, and not what the ~2 year outlook for their user counts is when they switch the squeeze on.
The problem is that turning Bluesky into Xitter or Facebook would never be a winning strategy. It's entire appeal is that it lacks the negative qualities of those services other services. If they...
The problem is that turning Bluesky into Xitter or Facebook would never be a winning strategy. It's entire appeal is that it lacks the negative qualities of those services other services. If they brought those into Bluesky, it's growth would disappear overnight as people would have no reason to use it instead of Xitter or Facebook.
It would be like if Five Guys decided to become McDonald's.
Eventually they no longer care about growth though. Once you're locked in, they figure they can extract some money from you and sell the site onto the next sucker before it comes crumbling down....
Eventually they no longer care about growth though. Once you're locked in, they figure they can extract some money from you and sell the site onto the next sucker before it comes crumbling down. It takes effort to uplift your social circle to another platform, so it's usually a decent way into enshittification before users actually start leaving.
How are Tumblr, Deviantart and even Twitter doing in terms of user satisfaction amongst the groups that used them at their peaks these days?
Tumblr's honestly doing pretty good, tbh. I doubt it's making much money, but they improved a lot of how the site functions and a lot of the toxicity left for Twitter. It's not exactly the next...
How are Tumblr, Deviantart and even Twitter doing in terms of user satisfaction amongst the groups that used them at their peaks these days?
Tumblr's honestly doing pretty good, tbh. I doubt it's making much money, but they improved a lot of how the site functions and a lot of the toxicity left for Twitter. It's not exactly the next pdf, but it's not really a good example of enshittification either.
The biggest complaint I (and probably most others) would have is the unfair moderation nuking trans women's accounts for next to nothing, but that's not particularly new either.
My fear is that an ecosystem that’s conducive to highly emotionally disregulated people with poor impulse control ends up being significantly more profitable for advertisers. You can imagine that...
My fear is that an ecosystem that’s conducive to highly emotionally disregulated people with poor impulse control ends up being significantly more profitable for advertisers. You can imagine that such people could be more likely to convert ad impressions into spending, it’s just a matter of how much more likely.
It could well be that non-toxicity hurts profit even beyond just lower user counts and engagement.
I don’t think Bluesky’s future is so strictly predetermined. There are certainly a lot of large websites that are backed by venture capital-funded startups, but the web is bigger than that. It...
I don’t think Bluesky’s future is so strictly predetermined. There are certainly a lot of large websites that are backed by venture capital-funded startups, but the web is bigger than that. It seems like Bluesky might eventually evolve in that direction, since they’re laid the groundwork to make it possible?
It mostly hasn’t happened yet, but there are some small independent apps already.
I think as long as the door is open to it and VCs are involved, all platforms will eventually enshittify. There's nothing in Bluesky's groundwork that seems intended to guard against that. In fact...
I think as long as the door is open to it and VCs are involved, all platforms will eventually enshittify. There's nothing in Bluesky's groundwork that seems intended to guard against that. In fact everything seems to lean towards the opposite. Even the "decentralized" architecture that they tout is only surface-level--an absolutely ripe target to increase user acquisition in the short term while leaving the long-term so nebulously defined as to never have to commit to anything before eventually dropping it. And we saw first-hand with Reddit that even a rich ecosystem of beloved third-party apps using official APIs is no kind of profylactic against enshittification.
I disagree that it's window dressing. It's currently not all that relevant for most users, but it's mostly implemented and there are external apps using it.
I disagree that it's window dressing. It's currently not all that relevant for most users, but it's mostly implemented and there are external apps using it.
I like the idea of users bringing their own account to a website. There’s baggage when authenticating with another service, you’re forcing users to connect with Google or GitHub etc. I think the...
I like the idea of users bringing their own account to a website. There’s baggage when authenticating with another service, you’re forcing users to connect with Google or GitHub etc. I think the AT proto approach with users taking their account anywhere, has real potential to become a ubiquitous feature. Carrying over your identity and moderation filters between sites seamlessly sounds like a pleasant dream.
AT protocol being open source gives me hope that the future of these ideas won’t be held back by greed.
https://archive.is/cH7KU This New Yorker profile includes a biography of Jay Graber (BlueSky’s CEO) and a history of Bluesky. (It’s rather amusing how they try to explain the concept of an...
This New Yorker profile includes a biography of Jay Graber (BlueSky’s CEO) and a history of Bluesky.
(It’s rather amusing how they try to explain the concept of an Internet protocol to non-techies.)
In early 2021, Dorsey and Agrawal started conducting interviews with prospective Bluesky heads. Jeremie Miller, who created the pioneering open-source instant-messaging system Jabber (and later became a Bluesky board member), sat in on the interviews as a consultant. He recalled that Graber easily became his pick. The Twitter heads had preconceptions of what Bluesky should be, he told me: “She didn’t give in to those and just propose the things that they wanted to hear.” Still, the search dragged on for months. In the meantime, Graber accepted a position at Twitter itself, working on blockchain technology. Then, in the summer of 2021, during onboarding, she got a call from Agrawal, offering her the role of Bluesky C.E.O. Put off by the protracted hiring process, Graber said that she’d accept only if Bluesky could exist separately from Twitter. Negotiating independence took another few months, but the decision proved pivotal.
…
Twitter had agreed to compensate Bluesky for constructing a protocol, with twenty-five million dollars over five years. Following a brief period during which Graber paid her first contractor out of her own pocket, Twitter executives made sure that an initial twelve million dollars went through. But Graber knew that, with Twitter’s leadership in limbo, she now had to think beyond Bluesky’s original goal of hosting Twitter. She put out feelers to other companies, including Reddit, about the idea of using Bluesky’s protocol. Then, in August, 2022, noting the dread on Twitter at the possibility of Musk’s takeover, she made another crucial decision: Bluesky would build not only a protocol but a social network to run on it. Doing so would offer a proof of concept, Graber said: “But it was also important in case we’re on our own and need to lean in on Plan B.”
Biggest complaint with Blue Sky is the image only posts with an image of.. text. Just post the text. Inevitably the same picture of text gets repeated with "this!" added.
Biggest complaint with Blue Sky is the image only posts with an image of.. text. Just post the text. Inevitably the same picture of text gets repeated with "this!" added.
I think Bluesky is doing a good job at running a microblogging site (as far as I can tell). They seem to have good moderation. I like the design of the website and the app. The decentralization strikes a good balance between usability and "forkability" (credible exit).
That said, I think microblogging is just fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads, it's all fundamentally the same idea for a social network and it all suffers from the same problems. Maybe, theoretically, someone could create a microblogging platform that is different. But it hasn't happened yet. (And the problem isn't investors, money, financial incentives, ownership, centralization, a lack of federation, a lack of customization options for users, or minor design decisions that could be fixed with a few tweaks, but the general idea of a microblogging platform as we understand it today.)
I quit Twitter in early 2021 and it was a great decision. It reduced my anxiety. It freed up my mind to focus on better things. It felt like turning off a noisy radio. Only in the silence afterward could I appreciate how much it had been grating on my nerves.
Ezra Klein has a beautiful polemic against Twitter in this podcast at 38:15. (The podcast is from December 2022.) He talks about why he quit Twitter and why we shouldn't want a Twitter alternative like Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky. He's talked more about this in later podcasts and also in a few New York Times columns. In one column, he writes:
Ev Williams, who co-founded Twitter and later founded Medium, once said in an interview that Twitter was like the limbic system — fast, twitchy, noisy, knee-jerk, reflexive, impulsive — and he wanted Medium to be more like the pre-frontal cortex — slow, quiet, reflective, considered. Initially, Medium didn't even have the ability to leave comments on posts, which I believe was a deliberate design decision to encourage reading and thinking, rather than reacting.
I don't know if anyone has quite cracked what good online platforms should be like. A few aspects I think are important:
-A focus on longer-form content. The maximum length of a tweet is 280 characters (or at least it used to be). In my view, a good social network will have many posts that are 5x, 10x, or 20x longer than this. I think blogging and newsletter platforms like Medium and Substack are sort of on the right track. There are also some niche forums where it's normalized to write blog-length posts.
-Really strict moderation and community norms around respect and kindness. In practice, this is hard to achieve. I've moderated several different kinds of online communities from small to large. It's incredibly hard. But we have to try, otherwise what's the point of any of it? I feel like the status quo is that online life is so nasty it poisons our real relationships because we take that nastiness off the computer and into our real lives. What if it could be the reverse? What if online communities made kindness the norm to the extent it encouraged us to be softer in our real life relationships?
-An experience centred around forming relationships and community with people, in which you gain familiarity with people over time. (Clearly visible profile pictures and different coloured usernames can help with this!) Think small Twitch and Discord communities (Slack used to be used for small communities sometimes too, but now it's pretty much all Discord), small or medium forums, and online games with small communities. The opposite, which we want to avoid, is an overwhelming, chaotic flood of content, in which you can't keep track of what's happening and you might not even realize if you encountered the same person twice. Think Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. Ultimately, we want to slow down the pace of information consumption (and the speed of reaction), humanize people, and create conditions that foster the growth of one-to-one human connection over time.
I don't think the primary obstacle to building online platforms that have these properties is that big tech companies have bad ethics, bad management, or bad incentives. The barrier to entry to creating new online platforms and new online communities is fairly low. Network effects and coordination problems make things harder, sure. But I ultimately see this as an innovation problem, or a creativity problem. Or a design problem, or a research problem — however you want to categorize it. The problem is a lack of good ideas about what to do.
I think I'm writing the same thing each time there's a post about Bluesky on Tildes... Their marketing team did an awesome job at selling a "decentralized" platform that isn't decentralized at all.
From your "credible exit" link:
So, users could theoretically switch to a different host, once Bluesky will no longer be dependant on a central node. See? ✨Decentralized!✨
Yeah, it's not even remotely decentralized. Mastodon and other "fediverse" apps are, but in some ways this is also their downfall - asking people to make an uninformed decision about which server to join before they can participate is a hurdle.
Yes, to a lot of us, this isn't hard. But for the typical smartphone user, it's a pretty big extra step over just downloading an app. And there isn't just one app. There's choices there too.
I understand why bluesky is doing well. But it's disappointing that they make this claim of being decentralized when it's a lie.
As an aside, the internet itself already has the framework to be decentralized, and it was for a long time. Anyone can spin up a server and share files, blog posts, etc. It was nice when the only "algorithm" involved was just directory sites and word of mouth. But I also acknowledge that having massive platforms provides an easier connection to audiences for businesses of all kinds (including small ones).
You can read like 50,000 words of exchanges between developers discussing/debating how decentralized Bluesky is, if you really want to get into the weeds:
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
I have only read bits of it because it’s incredibly long and I don’t have a dog in this fight anyway. As I said in my comment above, I think microblogging is a deeply troubled idea and most of us would probably be better off quitting it all, regardless of how decentralized or centralized any of the platforms are.
One observation, though: Bluesky is actually decentralized in an important way Mastodon isn’t. Mastodon doesn’t allow yourself to migrate your posts from one Mastodon instance to another. AT Protocol, which Bluesky is based on, is designed to allow that.
When mastodon.lol, one of the biggest and most widely recommended Mastodon instances, shut down, the 12,000 people who were unfortunate enough to have signed up there had no way to migrate their posts anywhere else. That’s such a bummer.
I think I had only posted a handful of times there and I only found out about the instance shutting down after it happened. There was no way to migrate my posts or my accounts, or even to see what I had posted. Not a big loss for me, personally, but it does reveal a weakness in the Mastodon model.
The claim that Bluesky “isn’t decentralized at all” or that Bluesky’s decentralization is “a lie” seems, to me, like it doesn’t really engage with the complexity of the topic.
IMO it's actually quite simple: do you need a central authority (bsky.app) to post on Bluesky? If yes, it's centralized. If you need a whole essay to explain "well it's ackshually decentralized if we use that very carefully crafted definition of the word", it's not decentralized. At that point, my personal website is decentralized because the database is hosted on another server.
I'll consider it decentralized when I'm able to self-host it, and when Bluesky will be resilient enough to function without its central node.
If you use the right software (not the default), you don’t need it to post. However, nobody will see your post unless the centralized relay picks it up. It would be like a website that isn’t indexed.
Alternative relays are being worked on.
So the short answer is “no, not yet. But maybe in a year?”
I don’t have a dog in this fight because I’m not interested in using microblogging services in general, regardless of whether they’re fully decentralized, fully centralized, or something in between.
I will say that I find your mocking tone frustrating. I am now shut down from hearing your opinion on things because your approach is so hardline and combative.
Sorry, the mocking tone was only directed at Bluesky, and not at you. It's just a result of my personal frustration (as I feel bsky is continuously being "sold" as something it's not).
Though you're right, I communicated poorly. Sorry about that.
This is disappointing, and I doubt that will change because it seems to be by design. (Disclaimer: I am not attempting to minimize that no migration functionality sucks in a lot of ways.)
I would imagine this has to do with giving you control of your own data, and honoring the privacy levels of others' posts. Migrating reposts and replies between servers could be tricky. Not only because you can put a granular permission level on each post, but because some instances block other instances and it would become a complex mess.
From a privacy perspective, losing your posts when your instance goes down is a good thing. It means you have the ability to remove your posts when you want to. (Obviously screenshots etc exist that wouldn't disappear if someone did that.) But for most users, it absolutely sucks and would likely turn some people off from mastodon forever if their host shut down.
I don’t know anything about designing protocols for decentralized social networks, but why is the AT Protocol that Bluesky is based on able to allow post migration but Mastodon/ActivityPub is not?
Yes, Bluesky follows Twitter too closely for my taste. The 300 character limit irks me.
But I wonder if the Bluesky infrastructure could be leveraged to create a different app with a more forum-like experience? You wouldn’t need to start from scratch with user accounts and per-user storage.
I’m wondering how to create a sense of place, like a subreddit? I guess there would need to be hosts and storage somewhere other than the users’ PDS.
Here you go: Frontpage is an AT-based Hacker News-like. Usage is low, but it works as expected.
Would a hashtag work as a subreddit substitute? You can filter posts by hashtag: https://bsky.app/hashtag/art
What else is missing? A mechanism to follow/unfollow hastags?
I remember reading that sometimes, loose communities would form around hashtags on Twitter, but that hasn't been my experience.
One difference between that and a subreddit is having some rules for what should be posted and moderation, so off-topic stuff gets deleted.
Seems like what you're describing is just a fundamentally different type of website. Longer form content and community formation are exactly what I don't want from a microblogging site. In my opinion the best function of these types of sites is to share small bits of news, such as a food truck broadcasting its location or a sports writer breaking news about a player trade. A comments section detracts from the utility of microblogging. Forming communities and having discussions should be on other types of sites. I guess that was the original idea with Twitter, but wanting to drive engagement and user base ends up with a ton of feature creep.
I don’t know if you meant to reply to me or you meant to reply to skybrian and replied to me on accident. In the comment I wrote that you’re replying to, I said:
If I had to guess, I would guess that most people’s lives would be improved on net if they stopped using microblogging platforms. I would also guess that the world would be improved on net if microblogging platforms stopped existing. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t need to know for sure, since that decision isn’t up to me.
When I was describing in my comment above what I want to see in an online platform, I was indeed, describing a fundamentally different type of online platform than a microblogging platform. (I think we should try to move past microblogging as an idea. Or, at least, I, personally, don’t want to use microblogging platforms anymore.)
No, I meant to reply to you. What I mean is that I think microblogging has utility, but as you say, there are parts that end up going bad. Things would be better if the functionality that enables those negatives (such as comment sections) were removed from the microblogging sites and discussion should happen on sites like the kind you are suggesting.
This doesn’t meet most of your wishlist but I stumbled onto Readup a while ago:
https://readup.org/
It has the barest of social interaction. You can only comment on an article that you’ve read. It must be very tiny because most articles have only a handful of reads. Anyway it’s calming compared to most sites or apps that have a social aspect.
Thank you for sharing this. It’s interesting but, as you said, not very active.
My guess is that the requirement that readers install a browser extension to participate is putting some people off. I rarely install extensions, and certainly not for a website that I'm not sure I'll use.
IMHO, Mastodon was designed to solve many of these concerns. There's no "chaotic, always moving newsfeed", likes don't mater, you can't quote someone else's post, etc. There's also a fork called hometown that allows longer posts if that's your thing.
For me, the main issue is having a single place where everyone is there and we expect that they'll all behave. I don't think anyone figured out yet a way of moderating at this scale.
The coolest part of Mastodon for me is that it feels like a small community where you can get to know each other, like Tildes, but you can still talk to the outside World. Assuming you find a cool community and don't just join the official one.
I see the premise of BlueSky as nearly fundamentally flawed. I don't want it to fail but I don't trust it not to.
The only way I see for capitalist socialist media to avoid toxicity is to accept that its ability to earn capital must be strictly constrained by boundaries separating it from toxicity. If venture cap is involved (and it is, with BS), those investors must be committed to those same boundaries. Otherwise, by way of demand for exponential ROI, enshittification, toxicity, is inevitable.
Therefore, BS will either run out of money or be forced to co-opt itself in service to its investors.
Even Google eventually sold out its "Don't be evil" values.
There is a silver lining here: If the venture capitalists involved realize that the vast majority of value proposed for users lies in the platform’s non-toxicity and being a viable alternative, they could see that keeping it free of just that is worth more than just “higher number of users”.
The mistake here is assuming that venture capitalists care about value for users in the long run. They care about value for users only long enough to pump the user numbers, then they care about revenue at the expense of users, then they care about how much they can sell it for at IPO, and then at that point it's not their problem anymore.
Execs similarly are compensated based on what the market did this quarter, and not what the ~2 year outlook for their user counts is when they switch the squeeze on.
The problem is that turning Bluesky into Xitter or Facebook would never be a winning strategy. It's entire appeal is that it lacks the negative qualities of those services other services. If they brought those into Bluesky, it's growth would disappear overnight as people would have no reason to use it instead of Xitter or Facebook.
It would be like if Five Guys decided to become McDonald's.
Eventually they no longer care about growth though. Once you're locked in, they figure they can extract some money from you and sell the site onto the next sucker before it comes crumbling down. It takes effort to uplift your social circle to another platform, so it's usually a decent way into enshittification before users actually start leaving.
How are Tumblr, Deviantart and even Twitter doing in terms of user satisfaction amongst the groups that used them at their peaks these days?
Tumblr's honestly doing pretty good, tbh. I doubt it's making much money, but they improved a lot of how the site functions and a lot of the toxicity left for Twitter. It's not exactly the next pdf, but it's not really a good example of enshittification either.
The biggest complaint I (and probably most others) would have is the unfair moderation nuking trans women's accounts for next to nothing, but that's not particularly new either.
My fear is that an ecosystem that’s conducive to highly emotionally disregulated people with poor impulse control ends up being significantly more profitable for advertisers. You can imagine that such people could be more likely to convert ad impressions into spending, it’s just a matter of how much more likely.
It could well be that non-toxicity hurts profit even beyond just lower user counts and engagement.
There is something to using strong emotions to manipulate people. See also the current US presidency.
I don’t think Bluesky’s future is so strictly predetermined. There are certainly a lot of large websites that are backed by venture capital-funded startups, but the web is bigger than that. It seems like Bluesky might eventually evolve in that direction, since they’re laid the groundwork to make it possible?
It mostly hasn’t happened yet, but there are some small independent apps already.
I think as long as the door is open to it and VCs are involved, all platforms will eventually enshittify. There's nothing in Bluesky's groundwork that seems intended to guard against that. In fact everything seems to lean towards the opposite. Even the "decentralized" architecture that they tout is only surface-level--an absolutely ripe target to increase user acquisition in the short term while leaving the long-term so nebulously defined as to never have to commit to anything before eventually dropping it. And we saw first-hand with Reddit that even a rich ecosystem of beloved third-party apps using official APIs is no kind of profylactic against enshittification.
I disagree that it's window dressing. It's currently not all that relevant for most users, but it's mostly implemented and there are external apps using it.
I like the idea of users bringing their own account to a website. There’s baggage when authenticating with another service, you’re forcing users to connect with Google or GitHub etc. I think the AT proto approach with users taking their account anywhere, has real potential to become a ubiquitous feature. Carrying over your identity and moderation filters between sites seamlessly sounds like a pleasant dream.
AT protocol being open source gives me hope that the future of these ideas won’t be held back by greed.
https://archive.is/cH7KU
This New Yorker profile includes a biography of Jay Graber (BlueSky’s CEO) and a history of Bluesky.
(It’s rather amusing how they try to explain the concept of an Internet protocol to non-techies.)
…
Biggest complaint with Blue Sky is the image only posts with an image of.. text. Just post the text. Inevitably the same picture of text gets repeated with "this!" added.
We've got very different feeds.