You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account. And even more people have no idea what the @gmail.com/@ibm.com is about. All they know is that some of their emails don't reach their contacts, probably because "the computer broke again".
It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.
Plus, federation makes validating accounts real hard. Looking for a semi-popular Twitter user on Mastodon will bring forth 800 Twitter-to-Mastodon-bridges with plausible-looking domains, only for the real user to end up using something like "hachyderm" as their domain name. I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
I have my own domain, and have email set up so that any email to that domain goes to me.
You'd be surprised (well, nobody here on HN would be) to know how many times I tell a business that my email is "their-business@my-domain.com", and they ask me how I got that email address, whether I work for their company, etc.
> It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.
It's not hard to someone with exposure to a certain medium. Though its a bit dismissive like it would be for a mechanic to question why a person doesn't know know about rotors, spark plugs and other "simple" car concepts.
> You'll be surprised how many people think they can just use first.lastname@gmail.com and have email magically appear in their account.
I get a pile of junk from people who assume they can do that. I guess I have a lot of stupid distant relatives. It was the same for Hotmail too I got so many hotel receipts, or resume replies etc. one went on for decade or more. Yes you can reply back "no this is wrong" but nobody listens.
> I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
Abandoning the concept of celebreties and instead using social media for social interactions with people who you can "validate" their identity by walking over to them and asking them for their ID.
This was the weakest point of the whole article, particularly because Mastodon and Bluesky are identical in this respect. The reason he doesn't realize it is that almost everyone is on the same instance.
So yes, you will have:
@stephenking.bsky.social
and
@stephenking.bsky.otherinstance
Unless Bluesky remains a single server, in which case it's not at all decentralized.
Small nitpick, the domain name used for a ATProto identity is decoupled from the server that hosts that users data. A username is established on ATProto by creating a TXT record of the users DID (essentially a public key). This is not identical to ActivityPub, because the users data is hosted / managed by the server that the A/AAAA record points to. ATProto users can migrate their data from server to server while maintaining the same username. ActivityPub users cannot.
Also, Bluesky is a centralized view of the data in the decentralized ATProto network. This means you will never end up having the problem where searching for a user on one instance will not show up because they are on another instance that they have not federated with. There are obviously tradeoffs with this, but IMO they do seem sensible. The nice thing about Bluesky is not that it is decentralized (it's not), it's that the data that it let's users interface with is decentralized, and if something goes south with Bluesky, another application can be built on the same data and users can migrate without starting from square one.
You've highlighted the exact reason this is a problem for mastodon and not for bluesky: on the latter, there's a default, so people who don't realise why it matters don't need to worry about it.
For the record, there are other differences - on Bluesky, you use your non-default domain to login in exactly the same place, there aren't 'weird gaps' between different domains.
The only “problem” bsky solves is choosing a server. But if ATProto becomes widely used, the problem will appear as in Mastodon today. The only way to avoid it is for bsky to never become really decentralised. So yet another VC-backed social media company.
Yet, people are confused by it. I think this is at least partly because there's even less to differentiate the different mastodon domains than there was to differentiate gmail and yahoo. And, of course, there are a lot of people growing up now who don't really use email, so the analogy can't be taken for granted.
What is the evidence for people being confused about that? Did any scientist some research about this, are there any facts or studies about this issue? Or does just someone think it is an issue?
This line of thinking is what makes the website user-hostile.
I completely understood the function of the usernames from the start, but to this day I still sigh whenever I encounter a new Mastodon user on a different network because I have to do a song and dance to get them followed on my main account. The whole thing is cognitive overhead I do not want.
You can say it’s “not a hard concept” as much as you’d like, it doesn’t change the reality that it is confusing and hard to understand for end users used to Twitter (which is everyone)
I'm noticing here that people are giving it the college try of insisting that email domains are "too confusing". I think the further down this rabbit hole we go, the more equivocal one has to be about how large percentage of the population that actually is.
I work at a company that relies on engagement with customers over email I'm sure plenty of other people here do as well, and whatever people's confusion with email, somehow they figure it out when they need to and the world seems to keep turning.
At some point this conversation is no longer about the specifics of Mastodon or BlueSky, it's just general information literacy and functional literacy.
Hilariously, arguments of the form "what if people do it wrong" like this were made even for the introduction of calculators. I think it's better understood as an ordinary rite of passage than the specific identification of a genuine problem.
I think people underestimate just how much “weird techiness” having two ‘@‘ signs creates. It’s (whether it ‘should’ be or not) immediately unapproachable.
Wait until you find out the tuple to identify you logging in on Amazon is {user@host.dom, password} or used to be: I had two distinct accounts using the same email address. Confusing!
This is true but still, Bluesky enables things that X just cannot.
I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky.
The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views...
The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2).
Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers.
"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.
> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service.
But the API access and federation should remain free.
Going more to the topic of the article rather than platform wars:
In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain.
So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic HTML page on my own website[0]. That way, if my Mastodon account ever goes away, all the threads I actually put any effort into are preserved.
[0] https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ I'm intro retrotech so this site is designed/constructed so aside from the videos it works fine on a Mac with a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. All the data is stored in a big JSON file so I can re-format it whenever I want.
This is an interesting concept, and I mean no offense, but is this just essentially a public journal/demo concept for a low data web page? I’m having a hard time imagining folks will spend any time saving/ intentionally re-visiting such a site, except for e.g. posting on here for curious folks to browse through.
I would have released the source, but it's just a big ball of PHP since that was the easiest thing to use to just pull some JSON off of mastodon and template it into HTML.
Related : Corey Doctrow's article (again) about how he doesn't trust Bluesky enough to move there from mastodon. Especially Bluesky's promise to allow users to migrate to another host in the fediverse.
"If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server"
He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server.
First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move.
Second, you can't move an account, you create a new one on another server which produces a new handle. You can move followers over using some clunky process few users would understand. It can take up to 30 days to process and may require multiple tries. In case any blockage happens between your old and new server, it gets even trickier.
Worse, your content cannot be migrated. It is forever stuck at the old server and at the whims of whoever runs it. Same for the redirect from your old account to your new account.
If the point is to have a robust network where your account, content and followers/followings are safe...Mastodon is the worst.
Any platform can wipe your account without notice, and so far as I'm aware, without meaningful legal recourse. Your only assurance against this is regular backups. There are tools you can use to automatically mirror your Mastodon / Fediverse accounts locally, as well as in-app content extraction tools.
Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:
Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.
> Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server.
I'm not sure this is up to date, but Bluesky/AT Proto's architecture is pretty complex to wrap my head around so maybe I just misunderstand. The biggest difference is that unlike Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't really have a single concept of an 'instance' that represents an independent segment of the network like Mastodon does. Instead you have PDSs (which is a user and their data), relays (which centrally relay multiple PDSs like a firehose), and the app view (the frontend for visualising the relay and interacting with PDSs).
Bluesky's AT Proto design has different trade offs to Mastodon. Bluesky seems like the more feature complete, technically superior, twitter-scale design, being expectedly more complex. Mastodon/ActivityPub is easier to boot up something completely decentralised, but hosters often complain about scale. The real test comes down to the resiliancy of the service is the main provider shuts down. At the moment I think Bluesky would suffer a lot more than Mastodon if the company just went away.
Thanks for the links! I think this perfectly captures my frustration here. It's like people have learned nothing and are, once again, making an aesthetic choice.
What does he mean there is only one "Bluesky server" ?
You can already run your own Personal data server (for your data), Relay (to aggregate all feeds), AppView (that holds a view of the data), or client (that talks to the AppView).
He's almost certainly talking about the AppView. Yes, people run their own PDSes, but afaik no-one is running their own AppViews. It seems prohibitively expensive. Even running a relay requires at a minimum terabytes of storage space (and presumably more when the network gets bigger?).
The AppView
- controls the way you can search posts
- has the ability to show or hide posts from everyone using that AV
- has per-user data such as notifications, last skeet seen etc
- is a CDN for media, and as such can filter there
- is where the algorithms of what posts to show are implemented
In other words, someone who controls the AppView holds a lot of power in the AT Protocol world.
At the moment, it seems that Bluesky are doing a great job with their AppView, and they've rather magnificently scaled with the extreme load increases in the last months. However, for someone like Doctorow who wants independence from being on someone else's platform, there has to be a viable alternative AppView, or at the very least a documented process for how to host it.
However, it's my personal belief that it's only a matter of time until people do this. I don't know how practical it will be (and what level of resources would be needed to divulge if Bluesky go bad compared to a Mastodon server), but it seems like this is a priority for them, and everything else in the stack has been made easy to self host (see https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q).
Can you seamlessly migrate your account (your id, followers, and posts) to another host without losing said followers? I think that's the main feature Doctrow is looking for?
Bluesky's only hope to be anything other than a twitter clone posing as a distributed protocol while hoping that Musk Diggs his own grave, was if it were a rich man's hobby and charity, and Dorsey has long left the building.
> This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.
I am a huge BLuesky fan. I have switched my entire social experience to it. I get good engagement, mostly with seemingly decent people. I almost always can find interesting things to read.
I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.
I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.
Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.
But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.
Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.
>Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1]
I have stayed away from it for a while, but after my partner switched over to it I decided to delve deeper into it. The openess of Bluesky to developers is a breath of fresh air and the platform itself has some really great features. So I guess you can say I'm a fan now too.
I was also able to create an app on Bluesky that grew to 15k users in less than a month[1]. The Bluesky team was really open to helping me with some rate limits to make sure it could continue running well too. Reddit and Twitter probably had similar vibes when they were starting out, perhaps Bluesky will face the same fate, but there are no guarantees with any platform out there.
I don't know how long you've been in the space, so forgive me if I seem condescending. Twitter and Facebook used to be extremely open and encouraging to developers. That's how they gained prominence, by allowing... nay, incentivizing developers to use their platform. Once they hit critical mass, that was all unceremoniously ripped away.
Assuming a for-profit venture like Bluesky gains critical mass, it will absolutely happen again.
I like, and want to use Bluesky, but I mostly use socials to share my content and engagement is not comparable - I may get 200 "likes" on Twitter and 7 on Bluesky, for example. So while I would like to stop using Twitter, it has no alternative for me, currently.
I found posting on Bluesky to be a similar experience to posting on X premium in terms of engagement. I had premium for the entire lifespan of my X account (I made it to play with Grok) and my followers / following ratio has pretty much been exactly the same.
Have you actually promoted your Bluesky account anywhere or spent time engaging with other people the same way you expect people to engage with you?
I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.
They are trying to avoid that. I hang around there pretty much. I expect premium services subscriptions will be the first try. If that works, and I think it could, that will be fine. The fact of it being a public benefit LLC makes the profitability requirement much less pressing.
Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.
What does being a public benefit corp actually stop them from doing on a practical level? I'm not familiar with the classification.
I am, on the other hand, familiar with the likes of Blockchain Capital, from whom Bluesky has accepted 15 million dollars in Series A funding. At some point they're going to get crypto wallets and air drops integrated just like Keybase did and the profits will come out of scamming the uninformed.
I certainly hope it works because rebalancing the world away from X is a win for the world.
I'm not sure we have much precedent for that model working to sustain any form of social media for the masses. It has in my experience been great for specific services (happily paying for pinboard on a yearly subscription!) but I'm not sure it will work for aby service aspiring to be a universal town square.
Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.
Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much?
Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.
On Twitter I get to see interactions between the people that built games I played as a kid, famous actors, Nobel prize winners, heads of state, and authors I had assumed died decades ago. If I write something insightful and relevant enough, I might get a gesture of appreciation from a FAANG research director, a prominent philosopher, or just someone who writes the funniest aphorisms I've ever seen.
It's toxic in some ways; sure--but it's easy to care about.
I have felt that pull myself, but can't help that even the "gesture of appreciation" is a somewhat hollow and superficial feeling of status. From that standpoint, I don't know that it's all that good of a signal to chase especially given the larger context of the limitations of Twitter.
I can see your point, the issue is that those rare insightful interactions are buried under tons of scrolling, irrelevant content, and people desperately trying to get noticed for whatever reason.
who gives a shit about famous people? authors I assumed died decades ago? Literally I do not give a single shit what Stephen King or JK Rowling thinks
have fun with that, but you just explained why it never appealed to me. Weird idolatry. Reddit has the same problem.
Interesting people talk about ideas, not other people
> something insightful enough
you mean if you play the game and are sufficiently blessed by the algorithm your demigod may offer you a blessing. The algorithm doesn't reward insight, lol.
There’s a broadly believed myth that it produces meaningful professional opportunities among certain folks in the industry. In my observations this is very rarely true, and in many more cases it’s a professional liability.
This is highly dependent on what particular professional niche you're in.
Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc.
A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online.
Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle.
There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.
> Open question, why do people keep caring about socials that much?
> Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity
I believe commerical, closed social networks are the ones that specifically breed this 'toxicity' people talk about. They're incentivised to promote engagement bait to drive DAU, page views and ad revenue.
Granted, it's audience is significantly smaller, but I think Mastodon immediately showed what a social network that had incentives aligned with users could look like. Bluesky has neat features putting users in control, like user-built custom moderation settings to hide things you don't want to see (like engagement-bait accounts, politics, spoilers, gaming etc). I think these are all user-centric features that Twitter or Facebook would never add people they conflict with their other business goals of promoting ads or other partner content.
All social media is bad, except for the ones you personally use? If it's about discussing pseudo/anonymously, you can do that on other plaforms too, right?
The author references gaming in his post. If your game is not on social media nobody knows it exists and you have no customers.
You are right about the toxicity and gamers are some of the most toxic. But they live almost entirely online, and you have to reach them where they are.
Going to guess that they get some sort of enjoyment or value out of them, their definition of “worth contributing to” is different from yours, or they do not share your standard of what “educated people” should do with themselves on the internet
A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself.
Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating valuable content on TikTok/Instagram/Bluesky/X/wherever, make sure you’re publishing it from a specific brandable name - and not generically posting good identity-less content. It doesn’t need to be your real name, as there are plenty of successful pseudonymous individuals out there. It just needs to be reasonably memorable and consistent.
I‘m not sure if this actually works.
In 2019 the live streaming platform mixer tried this and payed several of the biggest streamers a lot of money for exclusive contracts. The userbase didn’t follow and the service was shut down a year later.
I don't think that was a specific repudiation of that model in particular, I think there's a bit more of a fundamental strategic misunderstanding from the people trying to make Mixer into a thing.
To the extent that bringing big streamers onto the platform had an impact, it was a positive one I would say. But even with them there was too much inertia.
Not necessarily. I think it’s perfectly possible to be a random non-famous person that builds a following because they have insightful tweets/images/content. But the risk is that if you don’t give yourself a reasonably memorable publisher name, you won’t be able to transfer that audience to another platform, because no one is going to see your name and recognize it from elsewhere.
A percentage of their fans, and it can be a small percent.
You see this phenomenon all the time on people leaving X to Bluesky they expect their audience to just follow them and the engagement to be comparable and when it just isn’t you see them either quietly come back or just cross post and pretend they’re not back.
Readit News
Yes, and choldgraf@gmail.com and choldgraf@ibm.com are different email-people, too. This is not a hard concept.
It's not a hard concept, but it's a concept that was only ever explained in school to a sliver of the population actually using email every day.
Plus, federation makes validating accounts real hard. Looking for a semi-popular Twitter user on Mastodon will bring forth 800 Twitter-to-Mastodon-bridges with plausible-looking domains, only for the real user to end up using something like "hachyderm" as their domain name. I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.
You'd be surprised (well, nobody here on HN would be) to know how many times I tell a business that my email is "their-business@my-domain.com", and they ask me how I got that email address, whether I work for their company, etc.
It's not hard to someone with exposure to a certain medium. Though its a bit dismissive like it would be for a mechanic to question why a person doesn't know know about rotors, spark plugs and other "simple" car concepts.
Since I like surprises, do tell ... how many people think that?
I get a pile of junk from people who assume they can do that. I guess I have a lot of stupid distant relatives. It was the same for Hotmail too I got so many hotel receipts, or resume replies etc. one went on for decade or more. Yes you can reply back "no this is wrong" but nobody listens.
Abandoning the concept of celebreties and instead using social media for social interactions with people who you can "validate" their identity by walking over to them and asking them for their ID.
So yes, you will have:
@stephenking.bsky.social
and
@stephenking.bsky.otherinstance
Unless Bluesky remains a single server, in which case it's not at all decentralized.
Also, Bluesky is a centralized view of the data in the decentralized ATProto network. This means you will never end up having the problem where searching for a user on one instance will not show up because they are on another instance that they have not federated with. There are obviously tradeoffs with this, but IMO they do seem sensible. The nice thing about Bluesky is not that it is decentralized (it's not), it's that the data that it let's users interface with is decentralized, and if something goes south with Bluesky, another application can be built on the same data and users can migrate without starting from square one.
For the record, there are other differences - on Bluesky, you use your non-default domain to login in exactly the same place, there aren't 'weird gaps' between different domains.
@zuck.bsky.app
and
@zuck.meta.com
are two different accounts.
The only “problem” bsky solves is choosing a server. But if ATProto becomes widely used, the problem will appear as in Mastodon today. The only way to avoid it is for bsky to never become really decentralised. So yet another VC-backed social media company.
1. That didn't work as I expected.
2. I am confused!
3. Oh, that's how it works! I learned something.
Humans go through this every day, in domains technological and not.
I completely understood the function of the usernames from the start, but to this day I still sigh whenever I encounter a new Mastodon user on a different network because I have to do a song and dance to get them followed on my main account. The whole thing is cognitive overhead I do not want.
I work at a company that relies on engagement with customers over email I'm sure plenty of other people here do as well, and whatever people's confusion with email, somehow they figure it out when they need to and the world seems to keep turning.
At some point this conversation is no longer about the specifics of Mastodon or BlueSky, it's just general information literacy and functional literacy.
Hilariously, arguments of the form "what if people do it wrong" like this were made even for the introduction of calculators. I think it's better understood as an ordinary rite of passage than the specific identification of a genuine problem.
I've spend hours building a website (1) that counts which members of the French parliament still actively tweet on X, and which actively use Bluesky.
The "analyse.ts" script for X did have to go through scraping, in a real browser connected to a real account. It got blocked every 30 or so profile views...
The Bluesky script was a delight, using the open no-credentials API (2).
Of course the Bluesky company can shut down their website or their API. But still, what this openness permits today is a significant difference from what X ever permitted. Their abstractions will stay and could be leveraged by another company with a team of 10 experimented developers.
1. The website is https://politix.top. Feel free to fork it for your own country. 2. Here is the Bluesky script https://github.com/laem/politix/blob/master/analyseBluesky.t...
Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service.
But the API access and federation should remain free.
I'm glad you specified "X" there; Twitter, of course, used to have a very good API. The bar has undoubtedly lowered.
In moving to Mastodon from X a few years ago, I didn't want my content to be owned by a platform, but I also just don't have it in my to write blog posts, posting threads bit by bit works better for my brain.
So my solution was to write a script that took that any thread I start with a certain hashtag in it, and threadreader-style mirror it to a basic HTML page on my own website[0]. That way, if my Mastodon account ever goes away, all the threads I actually put any effort into are preserved.
[0] https://kalleboo.com/microblog/ I'm intro retrotech so this site is designed/constructed so aside from the videos it works fine on a Mac with a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. All the data is stored in a big JSON file so I can re-format it whenever I want.
I would have released the source, but it's just a big ball of PHP since that was the easiest thing to use to just pull some JSON off of mastodon and template it into HTML.
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02...
Older article : https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...
He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server.
First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move.
Second, you can't move an account, you create a new one on another server which produces a new handle. You can move followers over using some clunky process few users would understand. It can take up to 30 days to process and may require multiple tries. In case any blockage happens between your old and new server, it gets even trickier.
Worse, your content cannot be migrated. It is forever stuck at the old server and at the whims of whoever runs it. Same for the redirect from your old account to your new account.
If the point is to have a robust network where your account, content and followers/followings are safe...Mastodon is the worst.
Content migration isn't implemented yet, and as someone who's migrated a few times more than I can remember (three or four, possibly more), that's a bit of a PITA. But it is on the roadmap, and account migration in general has become far cleaner over the years, see note at bottom of:
<https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...>
I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and in the several times I've migrated things have become far smoother.
At present you can migrate your followers, following, and blocked accounts:
<https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>
Note that there are few if any proprietary / commercial services which afford anything remotely close to what Mastodon does, though blogging platforms probably permit import/export of content to a greater degree.
I'm not sure this is up to date, but Bluesky/AT Proto's architecture is pretty complex to wrap my head around so maybe I just misunderstand. The biggest difference is that unlike Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't really have a single concept of an 'instance' that represents an independent segment of the network like Mastodon does. Instead you have PDSs (which is a user and their data), relays (which centrally relay multiple PDSs like a firehose), and the app view (the frontend for visualising the relay and interacting with PDSs).
You can host your own PDS so you are in control of your own data and identity, and you can migrate away from Bluesky-operated PDS to your own, though at the moment you can't migrate back https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds/blob/main/ACCOUNT_MIGR... https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3l5ii332pf32u
Bluesky's AT Proto design has different trade offs to Mastodon. Bluesky seems like the more feature complete, technically superior, twitter-scale design, being expectedly more complex. Mastodon/ActivityPub is easier to boot up something completely decentralised, but hosters often complain about scale. The real test comes down to the resiliancy of the service is the main provider shuts down. At the moment I think Bluesky would suffer a lot more than Mastodon if the company just went away.
You can already run your own Personal data server (for your data), Relay (to aggregate all feeds), AppView (that holds a view of the data), or client (that talks to the AppView).
The AppView - controls the way you can search posts - has the ability to show or hide posts from everyone using that AV - has per-user data such as notifications, last skeet seen etc - is a CDN for media, and as such can filter there - is where the algorithms of what posts to show are implemented
In other words, someone who controls the AppView holds a lot of power in the AT Protocol world.
At the moment, it seems that Bluesky are doing a great job with their AppView, and they've rather magnificently scaled with the extreme load increases in the last months. However, for someone like Doctorow who wants independence from being on someone else's platform, there has to be a viable alternative AppView, or at the very least a documented process for how to host it.
However, it's my personal belief that it's only a matter of time until people do this. I don't know how practical it will be (and what level of resources would be needed to divulge if Bluesky go bad compared to a Mastodon server), but it seems like this is a priority for them, and everything else in the stack has been made easy to self host (see https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q).
Dead Comment
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
> This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.
Dead Comment
I have moderated the shit out of my feed. I rarely see things I do not want to (I had to give up politics and current events after the election). I use the list feature to curate separate feeds for different topics (music, programming, books, etc). I have started experimenting with graze.social to create my own algorithmic feeds.
I have changed my handle to my own domain. One of these days I’m going to move my stuff to my own personal data store because it sounds like fun.
Bluesky is also cool because of being the first mover/developer of AT Protocol. It’s my view that at:// will be a scheme that is as ubiquitous and important as http:// in a few years. That we will use it to login into stuff instead of facebook, google or github and that there will be numerous messaging things (including those sending money and other resources) based on ‘lexicons’ as well.
There are problems, of course. It’s new and people are pressuring them to do viewpoint moderation which is a terrible idea. There are still many features that are missing.
But, it’s a very fun platform with a lot less negativity than Twitter and a lot less bland stupidity than facebook. Threads is fine but it’s 100% zuckerberg’s feed. Tribal takes like four clicks to make a post. Mastodon is a bad UI and instances tend to be narrow-minded fiefdoms.
Most of the comments on this thread are talking about what might happen, ‘enshitification’!! Oh My!. The actual fact is that it is a good thing presently and I hope decen people will flock to it and make sure it is supported to reach its maximum awesome potential.
Unless the AT Protocol split it self from the company to be something like matrix.org or SMTP. Then Bsky will always have an advantage over other indexers. [1]
[1] https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/blog/bluesky-at-protocol-vs-...
I was also able to create an app on Bluesky that grew to 15k users in less than a month[1]. The Bluesky team was really open to helping me with some rate limits to make sure it could continue running well too. Reddit and Twitter probably had similar vibes when they were starting out, perhaps Bluesky will face the same fate, but there are no guarantees with any platform out there.
1 - https://listifications.app
Assuming a for-profit venture like Bluesky gains critical mass, it will absolutely happen again.
Have you actually promoted your Bluesky account anywhere or spent time engaging with other people the same way you expect people to engage with you?
Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.
I am, on the other hand, familiar with the likes of Blockchain Capital, from whom Bluesky has accepted 15 million dollars in Series A funding. At some point they're going to get crypto wallets and air drops integrated just like Keybase did and the profits will come out of scamming the uninformed.
I'm not sure we have much precedent for that model working to sustain any form of social media for the masses. It has in my experience been great for specific services (happily paying for pinboard on a yearly subscription!) but I'm not sure it will work for aby service aspiring to be a universal town square.
Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.
It's toxic in some ways; sure--but it's easy to care about.
who gives a shit about famous people? authors I assumed died decades ago? Literally I do not give a single shit what Stephen King or JK Rowling thinks
have fun with that, but you just explained why it never appealed to me. Weird idolatry. Reddit has the same problem.
Interesting people talk about ideas, not other people
> something insightful enough
you mean if you play the game and are sufficiently blessed by the algorithm your demigod may offer you a blessing. The algorithm doesn't reward insight, lol.
Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc.
A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online.
Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle.
There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.
> Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity
I believe commerical, closed social networks are the ones that specifically breed this 'toxicity' people talk about. They're incentivised to promote engagement bait to drive DAU, page views and ad revenue.
Granted, it's audience is significantly smaller, but I think Mastodon immediately showed what a social network that had incentives aligned with users could look like. Bluesky has neat features putting users in control, like user-built custom moderation settings to hide things you don't want to see (like engagement-bait accounts, politics, spoilers, gaming etc). I think these are all user-centric features that Twitter or Facebook would never add people they conflict with their other business goals of promoting ads or other partner content.
Reddit is the center of toxicity. One dissenting opinion and mods banish you.
Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating valuable content on TikTok/Instagram/Bluesky/X/wherever, make sure you’re publishing it from a specific brandable name - and not generically posting good identity-less content. It doesn’t need to be your real name, as there are plenty of successful pseudonymous individuals out there. It just needs to be reasonably memorable and consistent.
To the extent that bringing big streamers onto the platform had an impact, it was a positive one I would say. But even with them there was too much inertia.
A lot of us are just busking on the street corners.
A percentage of their fans, and it can be a small percent.
You see this phenomenon all the time on people leaving X to Bluesky they expect their audience to just follow them and the engagement to be comparable and when it just isn’t you see them either quietly come back or just cross post and pretend they’re not back.