Since Bluesky is invite-only and there's a lot of clamoring for invite codes, it's easy to think that you're missing out if you're not a member. I'd like to offer a different perspective, that most HN readers would probably be happier on Mastodon than Bluesky. In particular, Bluesky is very small, has a strange vibe, and has almost no technical content or people interested in it.
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.
Yes, this has absolutely been my experience too. I'm defending the protocol pretty vociferously downthread but the experience itself is exactly what you say: not the meaty tech talk I can go on Twitter or Mastodon for.
I was there for the skeets and hellthreads and whatever other meme of the day: it's pretty awful and if you're not participating, you get no likes, because the memelords are the ones racking up high scores.
No likes in themselves is not bad but they're a proxy in this case for real discussion, which is what you'd want if you're talking about React or Go or Rust or whatever.
I can confirm, Bsky is absolutely diminutive compared to even Mastodon. I've had enough productive conversations on Mastodon I now include it in my little bubble of 'social media sites where I may reach out and have a conversation with someone'.
Bsky is just... I open it and post things sometimes, but all the people I've found on it who I've followed don't even do that, so it's kinda empty (at least in the tech space).
I do like their mobile app a hundred times better than Twitter's, but ten times less than Ivory.
Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding. Having to pick a server is incompatible with the general public using it.
Bluesky is the only real contender right now. It doesn’t matter that it has a low user count. The main threat is that there’s no real incentive for people to run their own BGS. We’ll see how that pans out.
> Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding.
This would only slow growth, invite only is also terrible onboarding so it sort of invalidates that take.
Mastodon won't take off because it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Discoverability and fragmentation are problems that Mastodon will never be able to solve. These problems mean it's never going to be 'the place to go to figure out what is going on'. It might be the place for you to figure out what's happening in your specific interest group and that's fine but it's a different use case.
Go look at the list of servers each instance chooses not to federate with. Some of these are reasonable 'they botted us', some of them are ideological 'they are tankies', some are weirder/legal like 'they did not use the correct GDPR policy'. Some are capricious like 'fuck that homeserver admin, I just don't like them so we're not peering with them'.
I can't wrap my head around it, I know I'm a class of former Twitter user that used the service to figure out what was happening either globally or on a local scale (using geocode searches). I had follow lists on there of people in specific interest areas but I wasn't on there to be a part of a community, I do chat instead for that. I'm on Mastodon now and the people on my homeserver I think are probably all fine but I don't have a lot to relate to them about and they don't post too much about current events outside their interests. I can't just search federated messages, I can view the stream of them, but I can't search and it kills it for me.
I love the concept of federated services, I admin a matrix homeserver, but the structure of Mastodon makes it hard for me to recommend that anyone register anywhere else other than mastodon.social because homeserver admins are extremely reluctant to ban this instance permanently and if you ran your own instance there's going to be a ton of admins that just block you for X reason.
I disagree, only because I’m on Mastodon and a ton of people are missing.
A large chunk of the Apple nerd ecosystem I followed on Twitter moved, and I like that I can still follow them.
But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.
So without an invite code, and the possibility Twitter will disappear real quick, I’m left with no way to follow them and I’m just forced to miss out.
There’s no way to get a code if you don’t know someone. There is no indication when signups will open. I have no idea what my place in line is. I’m just screwed.
Ostensibly they are similar but there are some old threads also about how [bluesky TOS gives license to all your content](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35755501). Also, Bluesky is run by a private company. Mastodon and Bluesky have different ideologies behind them.
It really worries me that after all this time in development, and with Twitter collapsing, they are still unable to either;
1. Open the site up
2. Implement a polished user interface (bizarrely even Truth Social looks and performs better than this)
I do not have much hope that this is going to quickly change. I think at this point, the best hope we have for a Twitter exodus is to Instagram Threads.
Have you considered making a custom feed for the HN crowd? I think there'd be a lot of interest in that. Could work similar to the What's Science feed.
This was my experience too. I just posted a comment here actually about there being no “real” content and was downvoted. What the hell? I don’t really get the vibe of the Bluesky community right now. How do you get seen or get popular? What is appropriate to talk about? It’s not fun IMO until I can get my real life friends and acquaintances on there. But why would they go? Right now it’s just a social network of 100% strangers since no one I know is there. That’s not fun. That’s crap!!
What's funny is that while Twitter wants you to log in and goes at great length to prevent you from reading anything when not logged in, the situation is exactly the other way round with Bluesky.
They limit who can sign in, but openly publish all data via their API.
So one could use an AT protocol client to read, or a web based client like this one:
The guarantee is that the AT protocol doesn’t work that way. They literally could not, technically. You own your data, the entire protocol is built around that basic fact.
I have not looked into it very deeply yet, but as I understand the Bluesky project, this would not be as easy for Bluesky as it is for Twitter and Reddit.
You can use your own domain as your identity. Even when you use a service like bsky.app, you can use @yourdomain.com as your handle. And switch to any other service to publish under the same handle.
That is because Twitter’s network produces content which currently has monetary value, while bsky currently has nothing and will run the loss-leader game of converting VC cash into network (which will someday produce value) for as long as they can.
It baffles me that this pattern is not better understood in this crowd.
What is the value of the social network other than the network and the interactions it enables? I think there is a fundamental disconnect here that people keep glossing over because abstractly it seems like there must be some way to convert social networks into economic engines but because all social networks are about digital content the only point between the digital and the concrete is the advertising which is the only time social media participants actually see anything connected to any real world economics.
I'm going to make a prophetic statement and say that all digital social networks in the long run limit are not sustainable. The digital content generated on them has no real economic value and probably never will because the social connections they enable are inherently not monetizable.
When I go to the link above, all I'm seeing is "Create an account / Sign in". No post or anything. Sure it might be accessible via API but they have the same login wall as Twitter on the website.
Thanks for this. I had never heard of blue sky. I get to the site and it says they haven’t even launched yet? Maybe an error from all the traffic. Either way, I couldn’t see anything or even sign up for the service.
It's funny? Have you not seen the same phenomenon a million times now? Every social network-y thing does this. Once they get traction, it gets closed down slowly but steadily. See facebook, twitter, reddit, instagram... whatever bluesky is, its faith is set.
Sorry, is there an actual article with a real URL somewhere? Because this just goes to a lock screen going "create an account", so either everyone who upvoted this has a bluesky account, or the post got locked down and it's no longer information. It's just a gate.
Uhh, going from corporate gated community where the inmates and head are wacko, to another corporate gated community sounds like.....
Well, it sounds completely stupid. Do the plebes never learn that soon enough, their own community will be sold back to them after hijacking conversation for $$$$$ ?
"We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality.
We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!"
> If it's read-only data, I feel like hug-of-death should not be the norm.
That's what PeerTube is good at. Each video has a home site and a master copy, and each watcher helps to redistribute the video. So, if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server doesn't get hugged to death. At least in theory.
This is less distributed than bittorrent or Usenet. It's just distributed caching. Only videos currently being watched are replicated.
Now, PeerTube doesn't help with discovery. PeerTube sites only list their own videos. For this to take off and replace YouTube, a discovery mechanism (what we used to call a "search engine") is needed. Those exist.[1] (There are others, but some have bad SSL cert warnings.)
If you break the problem into discovery, hosting, and caching, all three parts are tractable. And no one part has enough authority to get uppity and act like they're in charge.
A lot of people trying to sign up probably. This degrades performance of one part of the system that is generally not highly optimised. This permeates everywhere
It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. Scaling problems are good problems, solvable at the right time without the evils of premature optimization. Doing work without a need is wasted effort.
Readit News
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.
I was there for the skeets and hellthreads and whatever other meme of the day: it's pretty awful and if you're not participating, you get no likes, because the memelords are the ones racking up high scores.
No likes in themselves is not bad but they're a proxy in this case for real discussion, which is what you'd want if you're talking about React or Go or Rust or whatever.
Bsky is just... I open it and post things sometimes, but all the people I've found on it who I've followed don't even do that, so it's kinda empty (at least in the tech space).
I do like their mobile app a hundred times better than Twitter's, but ten times less than Ivory.
Bluesky is the only real contender right now. It doesn’t matter that it has a low user count. The main threat is that there’s no real incentive for people to run their own BGS. We’ll see how that pans out.
This would only slow growth, invite only is also terrible onboarding so it sort of invalidates that take.
Mastodon won't take off because it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Discoverability and fragmentation are problems that Mastodon will never be able to solve. These problems mean it's never going to be 'the place to go to figure out what is going on'. It might be the place for you to figure out what's happening in your specific interest group and that's fine but it's a different use case.
Go look at the list of servers each instance chooses not to federate with. Some of these are reasonable 'they botted us', some of them are ideological 'they are tankies', some are weirder/legal like 'they did not use the correct GDPR policy'. Some are capricious like 'fuck that homeserver admin, I just don't like them so we're not peering with them'.
I can't wrap my head around it, I know I'm a class of former Twitter user that used the service to figure out what was happening either globally or on a local scale (using geocode searches). I had follow lists on there of people in specific interest areas but I wasn't on there to be a part of a community, I do chat instead for that. I'm on Mastodon now and the people on my homeserver I think are probably all fine but I don't have a lot to relate to them about and they don't post too much about current events outside their interests. I can't just search federated messages, I can view the stream of them, but I can't search and it kills it for me.
I love the concept of federated services, I admin a matrix homeserver, but the structure of Mastodon makes it hard for me to recommend that anyone register anywhere else other than mastodon.social because homeserver admins are extremely reluctant to ban this instance permanently and if you ran your own instance there's going to be a ton of admins that just block you for X reason.
There's one extra step, I think that's not terrible.
A large chunk of the Apple nerd ecosystem I followed on Twitter moved, and I like that I can still follow them.
But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.
So without an invite code, and the possibility Twitter will disappear real quick, I’m left with no way to follow them and I’m just forced to miss out.
There’s no way to get a code if you don’t know someone. There is no indication when signups will open. I have no idea what my place in line is. I’m just screwed.
What were the types of people who moved over to Bluesky?
Reminder that you really shouldn’t feel like this regardless of the quality.
1. Open the site up
2. Implement a polished user interface (bizarrely even Truth Social looks and performs better than this)
I do not have much hope that this is going to quickly change. I think at this point, the best hope we have for a Twitter exodus is to Instagram Threads.
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Dead Comment
They limit who can sign in, but openly publish all data via their API.
So one could use an AT protocol client to read, or a web based client like this one:
https://firesky.tv/
I just made an account, let's see how this thing works:
@gnod.bsky.social
Bluesky is VC funded and there’s expectations of revenue growth down the line.
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview
You can use your own domain as your identity. Even when you use a service like bsky.app, you can use @yourdomain.com as your handle. And switch to any other service to publish under the same handle.
It baffles me that this pattern is not better understood in this crowd.
I'm going to make a prophetic statement and say that all digital social networks in the long run limit are not sustainable. The digital content generated on them has no real economic value and probably never will because the social connections they enable are inherently not monetizable.
Deleted Comment
Until they don’t.
> I just made an account
Isn’t BlueSky invite only?
@donohoe.dev
(Email in the profile)
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Well, it sounds completely stupid. Do the plebes never learn that soon enough, their own community will be sold back to them after hijacking conversation for $$$$$ ?
"We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality.
We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!"
Maybe it's bad when lots of people want to interact with information all at once.
Or maybe when access to information is gated behind a bunch of javascript client/server interactions.
On the other hand, I'm out of touch and still just write static HTML pages when I can get away with it :þ
That's what PeerTube is good at. Each video has a home site and a master copy, and each watcher helps to redistribute the video. So, if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server doesn't get hugged to death. At least in theory.
This is less distributed than bittorrent or Usenet. It's just distributed caching. Only videos currently being watched are replicated.
Now, PeerTube doesn't help with discovery. PeerTube sites only list their own videos. For this to take off and replace YouTube, a discovery mechanism (what we used to call a "search engine") is needed. Those exist.[1] (There are others, but some have bad SSL cert warnings.)
If you break the problem into discovery, hosting, and caching, all three parts are tractable. And no one part has enough authority to get uppity and act like they're in charge.
[1] https://search.joinpeertube.org/
No-one learns.