> to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature.
I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong. My prediction is that Bluesky will be successful because of ease of use, not because of the distributed nature. Most users don't care about being distributed at all.
Except for the fact that it requires a centralized directory server that you can be banned from at any time, with no recourse. And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust without needing their own DNS names. It replaces social trust that's more accessible for a lot of non-technical users with a more complicated kind of technical trust that requires a high level of technical sophistication (Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of twitter users all signing up for a registrar and buying their own domain names?)
You've identified a real problem but blamed the wrong target. We don't need to avoid using domain names, we need to make them an order of magnitude easier for laypeople to buy and use.
99% of people who could benefit from owning a domain should never have to know what a DNS record or TLS cert is. This should all be managed by apps through a simple delegation system built on OAuth2.
You log on to bsky.app, they say, "want to connect a domain?". You say yes and get redirected to your domain registrar, where you grant access to for bsky.app to have control over bsky.example.com until you revoke access.
DomainConnect[0] should solve this but in practice it's turned out to be very gatekeepy in my opinion.
The other issue is that I fundamentally don't think the problems of moderation and hosting are "separable" as the paper claims—the moderation of your content is intrinsic to the question of "who wants to be responsible for hosting and paying for this content?". And people are going to want to use moderation systems that make moderation decisions they agree with and support—they're not going to want to be paying for a hosting provider that hosts content they disagree with. That's why I see the fediverse "plurality of networks" federated model winning out in the end, because it can be funded and operated by small groups of people interoperating with each other rather then requiring large centralized directory resources that nobody wants to pay for.
> And for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly
This is not really true. DNS allows you to set your name to a domain, but ultimately all of your posts are tied to your DID. If you wanted to move from steveklabnik.bsky.app to steveklabnik.whatever.app, you could do that still, no DNS required. You won't lose anything. The DNS stuff is effectively vanity.
Well, or a group of users can come together and attach their identity to a DNS server run by an admin they trust. If I register pinksky.com, it is fairly cheap for me to hand out subdomains to Bluesky users -- certainly easier than running a Mastodon instance.
I think the questions about indexers and firehose servers are more relevant to the question of centralizations. Identity is much easier to solve.
> being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly—a big step backwards from Mastodon where a group of users can come together and live on a server run by an admin they trust
In the DNS, that’s called a subdomain. I.e. a group of users can come together and buy a domain name and all use different subdomains, completely without any additional cost per user.
> and for users, being independent from Bluesky requires owning a DNS name and paying for it yearly
I don't think so. Anyone can set up a server with a DNS entry and then hand out subdomains to users. It's only sekf-hosted folk who need to pay for a domain name
To me, a Twitter successor has to do exactly two things: Look and feel almost exactly like Twitter, and have an escape hatch once things go south that lets me preserve my handle (essential), social graph (important), and post history (nice to have).
In other words, I want what has always been possible for email: Gmail with a personal TLD.
I haven't looked too deeply into AT proto, but at a first glance, Bluesky might be that.
Twitter didn't become big by being almost exactly like something that came before it. Learning something new was not a burden for all the users that jumped on to the Twitter train.
Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction.
It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.
Mastodon, Bluesky, Post and whatever else do just that. And they are not really successful at scale. So maybe people actually don't need those artificial protocol and GUI limitations?
There is an old adage about MBAs and CEOs - if we a pick a successful company in some period, can we really say that CEO helped it become successful? Or maybe he instead impeded its growth and company could have been x10 times more successful without him? Who knows, can't be tested repeatedly.
Same with Xitter clones. Maybe copying Xitter quirks is not the best way forward?
I believe the client is the _most_ important thing to focus on, but is often secondary to the needs of the server.
True RESTful (HATEOAS) APIs are really powerful, but they are a major pain for any client to implement. GraphQL APIs are worse than HATEOAS, but the client tooling is amazing. GraphQL won.
I think the same thing will happen here. The distributed nature of the Fediverse is really powerful, but creating clients are a huge pain. The API is so complex.
In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use which will allow more people to "play" with different clients and use cases.
It wasn't hard for me because I grokked what I was doing, but for a lot of people they've never had to make a decision like that before. Especially so early in an onboarding process. And they get caught up trying to decide if they should join the instance for web developers or the one for cat lovers, because both interests are important to them. It turns people off to the idea of federated social media.
I'm going to push back on the migrating being a challenge even for Bluesky if an instance vanishes. If nothing else, you do not need your old host ("PDS" in atproto parlance) to cooperate — or even be online — if you wish to migrate in Bluesky. With a local copy of your data, you can send your social graph to a new host with ease and be right back in business.
The initial premise was you can make an account anywhere and it works transparently anywhere.
The new premise after the "de-federation" update is it still works transparently so long you're a good citizen with nothing to be ashamed of, which is enough to make users feel the Fediverse lost its thing or something along that.
Question is: when BSKY goes belly-up, will all those users have somewhere they can turn to?
The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).
> The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).
Can you tell me more about that? If you just redirect webfinger requests, don't you still lose everything if your current instance disappears or you move to a new instance?
Was the death of MySpace identity-ending? Or bebo or Orkut or pownce or friendfeed or any other service? Users will move on regardless, and it won't be identity-ending.
The Fediverse “is complicated” only because it has been designated as such by countless bullshit media online posts, when Mastodon started to boom after the Twitter/Musk episode.
At some point, if people/users are able to understand the concept of emails, emails accounts and emails providers, they are able to understand the Fediverse that’s all.
> _I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong._
The Fediverse got nothing wrong or did nothing wrong, it was just portrayed as complicated, by some fing community manager of I don’t know which fing bulls*t company that must have been pissed/worried that all his job had to be redone on another service.
Personally, I haven't really seen any "Nazis" on Twitter that I keep hearing about (though that probably depends on the definition), I'm just excited about Bluesky because it has an open API that's not controlled by one dumb guy who can shut down whole businesses like Tapbots with a flip of a switch or decide that $100 per month is a fair price for "hobbyists" to use it... but I guess I'm probably an outlier.
Meh. Users have no issue picking an email provider. They can pay with money (eg proton) or with their data (Google, Hotmail), champion their local identity (think gmx.de) and they manage to pick the one that works for them. Why should Mastodon's diversity be an additional burden?
In fact a lot of people are now on Mastodon because they picked Instagram. Soon another platform may follow suit and federate. I'm sure users will understand pretty quickly that they can communicate cross platform just like a Gmail user can mail a Hotmail one.
If being distributed means the API is more easily accessed than other apps', it can contribute to its success by facilitating excellent third-party clients that users love.
I thought Bluesky was way more complicated to setup than Mastodon. It's a different concept and it's just like Twitter.
I still prefer Mastodon over all the extra features it has and it runs on ActivityPub. Bluesky is reinventing the wheel with a protocol only used by them. They could've built ontop of ActivityPub.
Metcalfe's Law is fake BTW. There's no one answer to these questions because some people want to be part of a tight-knit community and other people want to be part of a global network.
I'm curious whether their long closed Beta helped them or harmed them. Their invite-only beta lasted 1yr, from feb 2023 to today.
My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable.
My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year.
Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?
>Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives
I always find it weird when people apply the product logic to what is an ecosystem / network / protocol. If BlueSky, mastodon or any other combination of open systems succeeds it's going to be like Linux. Slowly eating proprietary systems inside out, simultaneously while the old stuff keeps being around.
Inherent to the entire logic of decentralization is that people switching to alternatives is not bad. That there's bridges between loosely coupled networks. If people treat BlueSky just like 'an app' that needs to be timed like an iphone launch that suggests people are missing what the alternative to closed platforms is about.
There are multiple decentralized chat networks all competing for users - Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Farcaster, and a handful of others I'm blanking on atm. Afaik they're not cross compatible, so once a user base gets established on one they likely won't move to another or cross-post much or at all. That's why the timing matters/ed.
In my opinion, a mistake may have been not allowing public posts for so long.
They could have stayed invite-only, and yet allowed posts being public. This would have allowed people to at least use it as a publishing platform, while the scaling was figured out. This was done a few months ago, but it seems to me it would have been beneficial to do it sooner.
BTW, I believe they had >550k signups yesterday. So all is far from lost.
Bluesky seems to operate pretty well with 3M+ users and 140M posts [0], but I'm fascinated to learn how the decentralized systems would scale if even just the Bluesky reaches within an order of magnitude of Twitter's scale (~500M tweets per day). Or from a behavioral perspective, what kind of ecosystem will evolve when the API has (afaik) no gatekeeping. The fact that anyone can see any other user's blocklist (both who they're blocking AND who's blocking them) probably has had at least a slight effect on interactions.
I am still tremendously bullish on AT, as well as BlueSky. I think AT solves a lot of problems that have plagued federated systems, and I think BlueSky’s focus on product concerns first and technical concerns second, while somehow still nailing the tech, is the right way to go.
I definitely find the AT folks to be the most pragmatic when compared to ActivityPub and nostr. The best example IMO is how neither of them have a realistic identity migration story. ActivityPub implementations need to support bringing your own domain to any Mastodon/Lemmy/etc server. As for nostr, PKI has yet to prove that it can provide a viable UX for identity management.
I'm still fairly optimistic about ActivityPub since a lot of the problems there are in theory solvable, but we'll see.
In this case the technical concerns are also ecosystem concerns:
BlueSky’s protocol depends on large scale indexers or relays which index the data from the PDSs and transform the nominal decentral streams into a firehose. That firehose then get’s labeled and filtered – and those services again must be somewhat Twitter-scale just to survive that firehose.
Now there seem to be alternative relays (and alternative labelers/filterers), but my concern is less with the man in the middle but the needed scale for the man-in-the-middle.
I think because of this need for scale inherent in the protocol there will only be very few of them, only by very well capitalised companies. If Twitter is a monopol, an AT protocol network will be an oligopoly, possibly a cartel.
I’m astonished that so many technologists who grew up in the more indie 90s and 2000s, in the time of the blogosphere, of individual servers, loosely joined via protocols, don’t seem to see that – or don’t seem to care.
I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
Why? I don’t mean this as a dig against the tech, since I’m not familiar with it, or with BlueSky, but where and why is there demand for a new social media product? I’ve certainly come to view social media as so close to useless that I don’t use it, and it seemed to me that e.g. Twitter becoming X or Reddit blackouts were impetuses that people eventually were thankful for as they left the platforms.
Twitter is among the top three websites that has organized my life over the past fifteen years or so. It's now totally collapsed.
I like having a place to post little things. I like keeping up with other people posting little things.
It isn't Twitter, but we don't have Twitter anymore, so. Just kinda giving things a go. I don't think we really can have "twitter" anymore, those days are past.
But yeah, that's just BlueSky. AT isn't geared towards a specific thing, like it is not a social networking protocol. It's kind of like if RSS was Git, if I squint.
Making social connections seems to be a hugely popular usecase for the internet. Even in its dial-up modem days the things I remember most are USENET and BBSes. People will continue to abandon and switch social media platforms, but I don't think that means they want fewer social media options.
Martin Kleppman is a technical advisor to Bluesky but his real job is as a researcher in distributed systems and security at the University of Cambridge. He also wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which many of us on the team have been fans of for years.
RFCs are used by IETF. I don’t think the Bluesky team is proposing an internet standard just yet. Nor should they - that’s not quite what the IETF is for.
Ill pass, it's difficult to trust and give my time to something with Dorsey at the helm.
Coming from mastodon, Im also confused, does bluesky have servers like mastodon? Because honestly being able to join a server that is aligned with my personal beliefs and actively blocks harmful users and servers is really awesome.
Like I don't care about your freedom of speech, I really just want to be able to block trolls and fascists from my feed.
The verge reported that about half of their 40 employees are on moderation and user support.
BlueSky absolutely gives you tools to block fascists. Including things like "I want to use this moderation list another user who I trust created so I don't even have to do the work myself."
Bluesky is not decentralized. It requires a phone number to sign up and has a CEO. The only thing remotely decentralized about it is the ambition of federation.
If you want a decentralized social network, checkout nostr or mastadon. And of those two, only nostr is censorship resistant.
Readit News
99% of people who could benefit from owning a domain should never have to know what a DNS record or TLS cert is. This should all be managed by apps through a simple delegation system built on OAuth2.
You log on to bsky.app, they say, "want to connect a domain?". You say yes and get redirected to your domain registrar, where you grant access to for bsky.app to have control over bsky.example.com until you revoke access.
DomainConnect[0] should solve this but in practice it's turned out to be very gatekeepy in my opinion.
[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/
This is not really true. DNS allows you to set your name to a domain, but ultimately all of your posts are tied to your DID. If you wanted to move from steveklabnik.bsky.app to steveklabnik.whatever.app, you could do that still, no DNS required. You won't lose anything. The DNS stuff is effectively vanity.
I think the questions about indexers and firehose servers are more relevant to the question of centralizations. Identity is much easier to solve.
In the DNS, that’s called a subdomain. I.e. a group of users can come together and buy a domain name and all use different subdomains, completely without any additional cost per user.
I don't think so. Anyone can set up a server with a DNS entry and then hand out subdomains to users. It's only sekf-hosted folk who need to pay for a domain name
(we run the largest instance of atproto outside of bluesky)
In other words, I want what has always been possible for email: Gmail with a personal TLD.
I haven't looked too deeply into AT proto, but at a first glance, Bluesky might be that.
Elon has weakened Twitter substantially and now it's leaving the door open to newcomers with ideas in a different direction.
It's the churn. Platforms rise and fall. But this time the power vacuum is so big a non commercial platform might have a fighting chance.
There is an old adage about MBAs and CEOs - if we a pick a successful company in some period, can we really say that CEO helped it become successful? Or maybe he instead impeded its growth and company could have been x10 times more successful without him? Who knows, can't be tested repeatedly.
Same with Xitter clones. Maybe copying Xitter quirks is not the best way forward?
True RESTful (HATEOAS) APIs are really powerful, but they are a major pain for any client to implement. GraphQL APIs are worse than HATEOAS, but the client tooling is amazing. GraphQL won.
I think the same thing will happen here. The distributed nature of the Fediverse is really powerful, but creating clients are a huge pain. The API is so complex.
In contrast to the Federvise API, the BlueSky API is easy to use which will allow more people to "play" with different clients and use cases.
I coded with both, I don't feel they are that different.
Same stuff, different platform.
[0] migration is a challenge if your instance vanishes without warning, but that's true of Bsky too.
I'm going to push back on the migrating being a challenge even for Bluesky if an instance vanishes. If nothing else, you do not need your old host ("PDS" in atproto parlance) to cooperate — or even be online — if you wish to migrate in Bluesky. With a local copy of your data, you can send your social graph to a new host with ease and be right back in business.
The new premise after the "de-federation" update is it still works transparently so long you're a good citizen with nothing to be ashamed of, which is enough to make users feel the Fediverse lost its thing or something along that.
The death of a Mastodon node is inconvenient, but not identity-ending (especially if one uses static indirection to link your abstract Mastodon ID to a concrete instance).
Can you tell me more about that? If you just redirect webfinger requests, don't you still lose everything if your current instance disappears or you move to a new instance?
Why do I need to run a webserver for this redirection? I don't have one; my TLD is essentially for email only.
AT proto lets me achieve the same goal using just a TXT DNS record.
At some point, if people/users are able to understand the concept of emails, emails accounts and emails providers, they are able to understand the Fediverse that’s all.
> _I think this is the most important factor that Fediverse (and Mastodon) got wrong._ The Fediverse got nothing wrong or did nothing wrong, it was just portrayed as complicated, by some fing community manager of I don’t know which fing bulls*t company that must have been pissed/worried that all his job had to be redone on another service.
They don’t care about copyleft or “information wants to be free”. They want a feed that isn’t full of Nazis and that all their friends post on
They don’t want to think about platforms, peering, distribution, server mutes, or any of that faff.
Dead Comment
In fact a lot of people are now on Mastodon because they picked Instagram. Soon another platform may follow suit and federate. I'm sure users will understand pretty quickly that they can communicate cross platform just like a Gmail user can mail a Hotmail one.
It's really not that hard to grok.
I still prefer Mastodon over all the extra features it has and it runs on ActivityPub. Bluesky is reinventing the wheel with a protocol only used by them. They could've built ontop of ActivityPub.
My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable.
My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year.
Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?
I always find it weird when people apply the product logic to what is an ecosystem / network / protocol. If BlueSky, mastodon or any other combination of open systems succeeds it's going to be like Linux. Slowly eating proprietary systems inside out, simultaneously while the old stuff keeps being around.
Inherent to the entire logic of decentralization is that people switching to alternatives is not bad. That there's bridges between loosely coupled networks. If people treat BlueSky just like 'an app' that needs to be timed like an iphone launch that suggests people are missing what the alternative to closed platforms is about.
They could have stayed invite-only, and yet allowed posts being public. This would have allowed people to at least use it as a publishing platform, while the scaling was figured out. This was done a few months ago, but it seems to me it would have been beneficial to do it sooner.
BTW, I believe they had >550k signups yesterday. So all is far from lost.
https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3kktadxl4tv2g
[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
> Top 25 Poasters
I'm still fairly optimistic about ActivityPub since a lot of the problems there are in theory solvable, but we'll see.
* it has by far the highest-quality conversations I've ever seen
* no right-wing freaks disparaging trans people in the replies to everything
ActivityPub does have a migration story -- people move servers all the time. But it's not as good as it could be, and there are rough edges.
BlueSky’s protocol depends on large scale indexers or relays which index the data from the PDSs and transform the nominal decentral streams into a firehose. That firehose then get’s labeled and filtered – and those services again must be somewhat Twitter-scale just to survive that firehose.
Now there seem to be alternative relays (and alternative labelers/filterers), but my concern is less with the man in the middle but the needed scale for the man-in-the-middle.
I think because of this need for scale inherent in the protocol there will only be very few of them, only by very well capitalised companies. If Twitter is a monopol, an AT protocol network will be an oligopoly, possibly a cartel.
I’m astonished that so many technologists who grew up in the more indie 90s and 2000s, in the time of the blogosphere, of individual servers, loosely joined via protocols, don’t seem to see that – or don’t seem to care.
I like having a place to post little things. I like keeping up with other people posting little things.
It isn't Twitter, but we don't have Twitter anymore, so. Just kinda giving things a go. I don't think we really can have "twitter" anymore, those days are past.
But yeah, that's just BlueSky. AT isn't geared towards a specific thing, like it is not a social networking protocol. It's kind of like if RSS was Git, if I squint.
Coming from mastodon, Im also confused, does bluesky have servers like mastodon? Because honestly being able to join a server that is aligned with my personal beliefs and actively blocks harmful users and servers is really awesome.
Like I don't care about your freedom of speech, I really just want to be able to block trolls and fascists from my feed.
The verge reported that about half of their 40 employees are on moderation and user support.
BlueSky absolutely gives you tools to block fascists. Including things like "I want to use this moderation list another user who I trust created so I don't even have to do the work myself."
Bluesky has servers (PDSes) but they're nothing like Mastodon. You can curate a community on Bluesky by following people or using custom feeds.
If you want a decentralized social network, checkout nostr or mastadon. And of those two, only nostr is censorship resistant.
+++ ATH