Hey HN, the engineering team at Bluesky is especially excited to get to this point! We're happy to help answer questions and help anyone trying to run their own PDS host. Things should work pretty well for self-hosters right now, but we're standing by to help if there are any problems.
Unrelated to engineering but the recent rebrand to a dead butterfly logo[1][2][3] may be off brand for a platform wishing to communicate a more open, social Internet built on first principles and scientific rigor.
Are you joking? This is private enterprise we're talking about. We'll all die before this company or anything similar is built on "scientific rigor" unless it directly relates to their profit margins.
> If you hadn’t previously noted the difference between a living and a dead butterfly, I’m afraid you will now begin to see dead butterflies EVERYWHERE, as I do.
I didn't know this (as most of us I'd guess). It was an interesting read though, thanks.
I think the value of a symbol is in the idea it communicates. Most people don't see a dead butterfly. They just see a butterfly. The reality of whether it is more or less like a dead butterfly doesn't especially matter unless a significant amount of people interpret the symbol that way.
It would probably be worth clarifying in that repo what the license is for both the code in that repo and the code that it's actually running. It looks like it's just a very thin wrapper around @atproto/pds, which is MIT/Apache 2.0 [0], but the repo you link to has no license.
Thanks for Caddy, Matt! Some of us on the team have been using Caddy for years, for many of our projects. Because it's so simple, sufficiently high performance, and has lots of nice features.
The on-demand TLS certificates with an "ask" endpoint is especially useful for the PDS use-case. Because there's generally a wildcard DNS name that is used to give each new user a domain handle (@alice.example.com) but we don't want to be vulnerable to a TLS certificate DoS/rate limit situation.
Hi. If the protocol is open, the software is free and the main instance openly federates with self-hosters, what's the monetization strategy here? Clearly it's not "harvest all the data and figure it out later" as that avenue seems to be shut down internationally by strengthened privacy laws and ads don't work well with federation and third party clients. Is "grow first, figure out how to make money later" still a viable strategy in this economy?
Given the PDS server works on ports 80/443 and I'd like to use a domain (@nytimes.com in the documentation, but say @example.com), how does it interoperate with existing services that already operate on @example.com , for example a website, blog, cloud.
I'd imagine this use case is quite common for self hosters. If it can't operate alongside an existing, say, nginx on this port, are there recommended alternate practices?
I'm excited at separating identity from hosting, of which self hosting identity gets us closer.
Does the AT Protocol only optimize for Twitter-like flows, or does it allow for other types of social applications to be built like Activitypub? For example a reddit-like social media.
Currently, atproto works probably best for public social apps, like microblogging, forums, etc. So yes, it's definitely possible to build a reddit-like social app on atproto.
Part of the change today is that the PDS and Relay[1] now support non-app.bsky record types. This is quite new, so there could be issues, but we're prepared to fix any issues that crop up.
Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky PDS service any longer, in most cases.
By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to prevent random people from creating an account. Later other options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming soon.
Yeah, there's nothing preventing someone from running the PDS server on other distributions. The installer just does a few convenient things for you (like install Docker, opens port 80/443 using ufw, etc) and we haven't added and tested support for other distributions.
There is a Docker compose file in the repo, and advanced users shouldn't have any problems running the code on another distribution or even without Docker if they prefer.
Advanced users can just view the installer script as documentation.
yeah it works fine on bare metal, you'll just have to do a bit more set up work yourself (https terminating and such). The installer script should be instructive in how to run it but you'll have to figure out the BSD specific stuff
Look into the service folder in the repo—this repo is just a very thin packaging wrapper for a JS library, which you should be able to run anywhere you can run Node.
If I wanted to create a consumer hardware product that packages the PDS host in a user-friendly interface, does the software license permit that?
Also, services like Twitter started off with a developer friendly open API, and then it got closed off when the business needed to make money off the platform. What's the difference with Bluesky?
It's MIT/Apache 2.0 licensed, so yes. However, because it's also an open protocol, even if it wasn't, you could write your own under whatever license you want.
> What's the difference with Bluesky?
BlueSky is built off of an open protocol, called AT. https://atproto.com/ BlueSky is a particular app built on the protocol. As such, there's no way to "turn off the API," as BlueSky itself is a participant in the open protocol.
They could like, re-write everything to be a central service, port the user data over to it, and then pull out from the network, but then two things would happen:
1. stuff would break, as it's no longer part of the network.
2. since there is true account portability, users could simply swap to a different PDS and client, and re-route around the damage.
Also given that it's against their entire stated mission and goals, it would be social suicide.
Now that individual posts can be viewed without logging in, is there a way to view/load a feed without authentication?
I'm working on a client and there's a specific scenario where I want to be able to show a feed like "Top 20 - Past 3 Hours" before a user has logged in to their Bluesky account.
we need a new version of Zawinski's Law: every system capable of deploying plugins will eventually expand until it is a full hosting solution.
I know if there's one thing I'm eager to do it's to host even more stuff in that clunky piece of shit that has half a dozen main menu items for nonsense and buries everything of interest or value under "Settings"
I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are.
I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM.
I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.
IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd.
I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users.
I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.
I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.
If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.
It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.
Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly harder to achieve than DM's.
I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists, prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.
This whole thread is oof. Modern politics, to include both sides of the spectrum, has devolved rapidly. It feels like a real-life version of the Spiderman meme.
Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three.
As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.
I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow. Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.
I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that.
If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me.
Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees.
We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.
The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that.
Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.
I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more!
Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.
Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews.
Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me.
I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.
Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk.
It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.
It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.
American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.
I think they nailed every Mastodon criticism that I've heard floating around and addressed it, however I'm especially curious to learn about the moderation layer in-depth.
I cannot see how BlueSky's moderation system can ever work. Decoupling moderation and hosting means there's no onus to do the moderation that they describe: which makes me think it will be BlueSky Inc., and only other corporations, that have resources to throw employees at a now thankless, Facebook-style moderation job. And instances have to moderate anyway, in order to not host illegal content.
It'd be nice to see an updated version of those that describes how those ideas and tools relate to a self/third-party hosting. The best I can tell, this is the model:
My understanding is that each host has control over what they host and can subscribe to third party content filtering services to help do so.
Then various indexes/aggregators (potentially third party) crawl hosts and provide services to find content. This is where voting or toxicity checks can be applied to manipulate reach.
This content is also tag-able via third party services (and may be used by indexes/aggregators).
The user is then able to select/configure indexes/aggregators and filter based on tags.
I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.
What's nice about the architecture most fedi software including Mastodon follow is that if a better protocol than ActivityPub comes along (like perhaps, Spritely) they can add support for it and concurrently federate with both protocols. Mastodon used to do this with OStatus.
How can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?
In the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer accepting connections from others, as long as most people keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to take it "private".
Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.
You are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.
That would only work if Bluesky stays the only significant network node. Which is _possible_, but we haven't seen it with, say, Mastodon. Google Chat was arguably a bit of a special case; vast majority of users never used federation at all, whereas any Bluesky user will, pretty much, just by naturally using Bluesky.
It worked with Mastodon because it was diverse and well-distributed from the beginning even when it was young. I'm skeptical that other people are going to run their own BS servers at scale now that it's been normalized to always just use the firstparty one.
BlueSky's first revenue generation (in my understanding, I don't work there) has been a partnership with NameCheap that makes it easy for non-technical users to purchase a domain name and use it as their BlueSky username.
They have been a bit vague about other ways to generate revenue, except in one case: they will not be using advertisements to monetize.
I am very excited that this shipped! I believed the team would pull it off, but there's been a lot of skepticism, some justified, some unjustified, IMHO. Hopefully this will assuage some people's concerns.
I am unsure if I am going to run my own just yet. We'll see.
I really like the fresh ideas in Bluesky, in this case especially the different ideas regarding federation in comparison to Mastodon. I've tried Mastodon extensively and it is lacking in so many ways.
There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all.
Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.
Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists.
Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network.
I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future.
I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.
I looked at the site and I see a lot of comparisons to 'old social'. But for people who might run their own node or decide to commit to the network and encourage their friends to join them, it seems your true major competitor would be projects like mastodon.
Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity, core competencies, limitations, and risks.
The linked blog post includes a section called "Does this mean Bluesky is going to be like Mastodon?" which lists a few differences. Is there something in addition that would be worth clarifying? I agree it would be great to include that on the site and not just on the post.
Thanks for pointing that out! I read again and see the blog post has a summary with 4 very high level points, which I admit I didn't read initially. I saw a wall of text about an expansion and I was still asking myself 'What exactly is Bluesky and how is it different?', so I skipped right to the main site.
Having read the post more deeply, particularly the bullet points you mentioned, it looks like there are four really high level differentiators listed:
* A focus on the global conversation
* Composable moderation
* Composable feeds
* Account portability
The term 'composable' seems almost misused when reading the extended descriptions, and is used differently between points. For example, 'composable moderation' indicates that moderation isn't done on a per-server level.
The fundamental censorship and algorithmic prioritization models for distributed social networks seems to have three layers: global (centralized), server, user.
In 'old social' the model is basically just 'global', as there are no servers and the only 'user-level' options are those determined by the global operator.
It doesn't seem like moderation would truly be 'composable' if it's only set on the global and user (and therefore global via centralized determination of client-level specs) level. It sounds like Facebook except with other people paying the data costs.
The next bullet indicates 'composable feeds', which sound like a very nice feature but really don't seem to follow a decentralized model either. The 'composition' does not combine from each global/server/user layer. They sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'.
It would be on the same level of 'old social' adding a new feature to their web app, more than a fundamental transfer of control to the network. As a result, when the dollars dry up and the feature isn't financially plausible, or a PM somewhere makes a bad decision because he read a blog post about how great it is to destroy user choice, there's risk the feature could go away.
Anyway, the question I'm still left with in the end is this. If moderation is done globally, and I can't exercise any control over the prioritization of content beyond what is granted to me by the global provider (even though there are more and better choices than 'old social'), what's the benefit of running a federated node?
I don't mean to make it sound like this is some kind of Twitter clone with an SSO login that outsources operational costs to volunteers while still keeping a fundamentally iron grip on control. I'm just honestly confused at the value proposition for volunteers. Exactly how much control is transferred to the network beyond simply hosting data which is displayed according to how the centralized portion of the system determines?
It'd be good if the trade-off in terms of time, data, and performance for running your own node was simply to remove the capability of the centralized network to collect user behavioral metrics and such. That's a great and valid reason to host your own service or use a trusted party's service. But there's no mention of this if it is the case. If you provide that already without promoting the fact, maybe bring that up with your marketing team.
Anyway that's getting a bit off topic. But to the original point:
Ideally, a better comparison would be a dedicated page which coallates every feature of each platform in a grid. A row for each feature. Row cells would fill with 'has' or 'does not have' checkboxes or possibly text where there's something similar but differs sufficiently to require an explanation. Maybe with links to documentation or direct to UI on the line items where appropriate.
To me, the only question worth asking is the following. If a hypothetical guy, let's say his name is Melon Usk (lol) tries to buy or otherwise influence Bluesky, he's going to still mostly be able to do it with this relatively centralized moderation model, yes?
This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we still retain most of the useful control?"
No. There are two components: data storage, and "indexing". You can always, feasibly, own your data. Being your own indexer is less feasible, but you'd choose one like you'd choose a Mastodon instance or something. Portability is trivial because you have the data. "Usk" buys your indexer to put ads on it, you can just move. Moderation only controls what you see on your feed, using a different indexer just means logging into a different site and seeing a slightly different set of posts.
I'm confused, your first word is "no," but your answer seems to suggest "yes, usk would be able to have considerable influence"
Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing.
"Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability to leave? What am I missing?
Readit News
Technical details and the installer are in the GitHub repo https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
And we're on Discord available to help: https://discord.com/invite/UWS6FFdhMe
[1]https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013
[3]https://bsky.social/about/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly
Are you joking? This is private enterprise we're talking about. We'll all die before this company or anything similar is built on "scientific rigor" unless it directly relates to their profit margins.
I didn't know this (as most of us I'd guess). It was an interesting read though, thanks.
Edit: now it has one! Thanks!
[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@atproto/pds
The on-demand TLS certificates with an "ask" endpoint is especially useful for the PDS use-case. Because there's generally a wildcard DNS name that is used to give each new user a domain handle (@alice.example.com) but we don't want to be vulnerable to a TLS certificate DoS/rate limit situation.
I'd imagine this use case is quite common for self hosters. If it can't operate alongside an existing, say, nginx on this port, are there recommended alternate practices?
I'm excited at separating identity from hosting, of which self hosting identity gets us closer.
Does the AT Protocol only optimize for Twitter-like flows, or does it allow for other types of social applications to be built like Activitypub? For example a reddit-like social media.
Part of the change today is that the PDS and Relay[1] now support non-app.bsky record types. This is quite new, so there could be issues, but we're prepared to fix any issues that crop up.
1. https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architect...
Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky PDS service any longer, in most cases.
By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to prevent random people from creating an account. Later other options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming soon.
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There is a Docker compose file in the repo, and advanced users shouldn't have any problems running the code on another distribution or even without Docker if they prefer.
Advanced users can just view the installer script as documentation.
There's an (incomplete) list here: https://docs.bsky.app/showcase
And the protocol is documented here: https://atproto.com
I use BSD, and all I see is a installer for Debian/Ubuntu.
No guide in sight for bare metal nor telling you what services/software are required.
Also, services like Twitter started off with a developer friendly open API, and then it got closed off when the business needed to make money off the platform. What's the difference with Bluesky?
It's MIT/Apache 2.0 licensed, so yes. However, because it's also an open protocol, even if it wasn't, you could write your own under whatever license you want.
> What's the difference with Bluesky?
BlueSky is built off of an open protocol, called AT. https://atproto.com/ BlueSky is a particular app built on the protocol. As such, there's no way to "turn off the API," as BlueSky itself is a participant in the open protocol.
They could like, re-write everything to be a central service, port the user data over to it, and then pull out from the network, but then two things would happen:
1. stuff would break, as it's no longer part of the network.
2. since there is true account portability, users could simply swap to a different PDS and client, and re-route around the damage.
Also given that it's against their entire stated mission and goals, it would be social suicide.
I'm working on a client and there's a specific scenario where I want to be able to show a feed like "Top 20 - Past 3 Hours" before a user has logged in to their Bluesky account.
Any chance the team could create a Home Assistant add-on for this? https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/
I think the Home Assistant community would go WILD for being able to self-host their Bluesky data straight from home with just a few clicks.
It's a pretty big crowd of people. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/ 327k willing to opt-in to analytics.
I know if there's one thing I'm eager to do it's to host even more stuff in that clunky piece of shit that has half a dozen main menu items for nonsense and buries everything of interest or value under "Settings"
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I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM.
I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.
IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd.
I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users.
Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.
If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.
Congrats on launching! Excited to see what y'all do next.
As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.
GIF support: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1047
Audio/video support: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1052
If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me.
Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees.
We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.
The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that.
Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.
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I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more!
Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.
Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me.
[Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN)
I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.
It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.
Interesting. I see it as the de-facto journalist platform, which to me (as a non american) make it very left leaning. But then again, I don't use X.
You'll want to read:
* "Composable Moderation," this is the core conceptual idea: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
* "Moderation in a Public Commons," which describes specific features that were added in pursuit of the previously-described goal https://bsky.social/about/blog/6-23-2023-moderation-proposal...
* "Bluesky 2023 Moderation Report," which discusses specifically how (what is now) the main instance was moderated last year https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023
My understanding is that each host has control over what they host and can subscribe to third party content filtering services to help do so.
Then various indexes/aggregators (potentially third party) crawl hosts and provide services to find content. This is where voting or toxicity checks can be applied to manipulate reach.
This content is also tag-able via third party services (and may be used by indexes/aggregators).
The user is then able to select/configure indexes/aggregators and filter based on tags.
For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.
Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.
(https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)
They have been a bit vague about other ways to generate revenue, except in one case: they will not be using advertisements to monetize.
I am unsure if I am going to run my own just yet. We'll see.
There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all.
Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.
Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists.
Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network.
I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future.
I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.
Yet there are no comparisons on the site. I don't see even see a mention. This makes it difficult to evaluate relative maturity, core competencies, limitations, and risks.
Having read the post more deeply, particularly the bullet points you mentioned, it looks like there are four really high level differentiators listed:
* A focus on the global conversation
* Composable moderation
* Composable feeds
* Account portability
The term 'composable' seems almost misused when reading the extended descriptions, and is used differently between points. For example, 'composable moderation' indicates that moderation isn't done on a per-server level.
The fundamental censorship and algorithmic prioritization models for distributed social networks seems to have three layers: global (centralized), server, user.
In 'old social' the model is basically just 'global', as there are no servers and the only 'user-level' options are those determined by the global operator.
It doesn't seem like moderation would truly be 'composable' if it's only set on the global and user (and therefore global via centralized determination of client-level specs) level. It sounds like Facebook except with other people paying the data costs.
The next bullet indicates 'composable feeds', which sound like a very nice feature but really don't seem to follow a decentralized model either. The 'composition' does not combine from each global/server/user layer. They sound more like 'custom feeds' which users can define based on global content, using predefined criteria determined by a client (web app) which don't really a way to control the behavior of. Which makes this feature only truly operate on the global layer, and 'custom' rather than 'composable'.
It would be on the same level of 'old social' adding a new feature to their web app, more than a fundamental transfer of control to the network. As a result, when the dollars dry up and the feature isn't financially plausible, or a PM somewhere makes a bad decision because he read a blog post about how great it is to destroy user choice, there's risk the feature could go away.
Anyway, the question I'm still left with in the end is this. If moderation is done globally, and I can't exercise any control over the prioritization of content beyond what is granted to me by the global provider (even though there are more and better choices than 'old social'), what's the benefit of running a federated node?
I don't mean to make it sound like this is some kind of Twitter clone with an SSO login that outsources operational costs to volunteers while still keeping a fundamentally iron grip on control. I'm just honestly confused at the value proposition for volunteers. Exactly how much control is transferred to the network beyond simply hosting data which is displayed according to how the centralized portion of the system determines?
It'd be good if the trade-off in terms of time, data, and performance for running your own node was simply to remove the capability of the centralized network to collect user behavioral metrics and such. That's a great and valid reason to host your own service or use a trusted party's service. But there's no mention of this if it is the case. If you provide that already without promoting the fact, maybe bring that up with your marketing team.
Anyway that's getting a bit off topic. But to the original point:
Ideally, a better comparison would be a dedicated page which coallates every feature of each platform in a grid. A row for each feature. Row cells would fill with 'has' or 'does not have' checkboxes or possibly text where there's something similar but differs sufficiently to require an explanation. Maybe with links to documentation or direct to UI on the line items where appropriate.
This feels like "thanks for offloading some of the data, but we still retain most of the useful control?"
Which is to say, neither storage nor indexing -- but moderation -- the ability to have control over that would be the most important thing.
"Usk" buys (or otherwise leverages money to be able to put his thumb on the control of ) bluesky's moderation. Data storage just gives you the ability to leave? What am I missing?