Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

I left Xitter about 6 weeks ago and went all in on Bluesky. Took time to give feedback to the algo, but it's doing much better these days. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much, you'll get the same news & events on Bluesky. A lot of people who were scared of losing their following are reporting more, better engagement with lower follower counts.

What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation.

- DID for identity

- PDS for data mobility

- algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes

- Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra

I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.

Blueskey seems to have all of these neat features that developers/nerds seem to like, but literally nobody else cares about.

It's not that they don't care, it's more that they are used to centralized social media and unaware of even the possibility for a different paradigm.

I have seen them respond with intrigue and support once these things are explained.

It also looks like Twitter but with none of the content

That's my favourite thing about it, really. It's very interesting at the technical level, but regular users simply do not need to care about any of that. They're adopting it anyway because it works.

Most other "interesting protocol" projects are used exclusively by interesting-protocol enthusiasts.

A proper decentralized publishing platform would be content addressed not federated which retains all the downsides of centralization.

The bluesky team worked previously on IPFS and Dat/Hypercore and Secure Scuttlebutt. Whyrusleeping - one of the core authors of IPFS - has been an active technical advisor from the start. ATProto is basically those p2p & content addressed techs moved into the server stack. None of us are bullish on client side p2p for large scale publishing or social applications, and we spent 10 years each doing that.

P2P is hard, but that does not mean undesirable.

One can authenticate message integrity on the client side and the server side, it doesn't have to be a trade-off. The same is true for encryption and decryption.

Feel free to pick up where we left off, but just know that you're in for a lot of pain on key sync, device pairing, unreliable data availability, poor connection establishment latency, high end-user device resource usage, and very small data indexes which make it nearly impossible to produce even moderately-sized social networks.

I want a social network like X/BlueSky but it uses a community notes style algorithm to decide what content to show me instead of raw engagement. Should get rid of the trolls as Paul Graham wants to happen.

Can you expand on your thoughts a bit? Do you envision that a very large amount of posts get reviewed in a community notes style?

I was wondering these days if something like this could exist. Can one follow along somewhere?

The algorithm would analyze the post's/user's likes. If a post/user is liked by people who often disagree, then boost the engagement of that post/user. If a post/user is liked by an echo chamber, then deboost it.

What you describe is a flamewar maintenance algorithm. I mean, it COULD work if all people were sound and reasonable, but that's obviously not the case. And being a flamewar battleground is probably not the goal of most platform owners either. Also, for many topics that are not politics you don't need disagreement for a productive discussion.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. It's not just hard, but the user experience with it is just terrible. The masses will not use it. If the masses will not use something that requires network effects to be successful, there's no point. These problems may be solvable, but I think I'd trust the opinions of people who have worked on it for years and decided to do something else.

> I mean, it COULD work if all people were sound and reasonable, but that's obviously not the case.

But community notes works well. That's evidence that reasonableness emerges when you boost content that a diversity of people appreciate, regardless of whether people are sound and reasonable.

> What you describe is a flamewar maintenance algorithm.

Are you saying my idea will increase flamewars? I believe it should decrease flamewars, and that's why I want to see it implemented. Again I point to community notes. If a diversity of people like content, it's probably level-headed, and that's why community notes works so well.

Reddit can still be a great place to discuss hobbies and foment helpful and insightful discussion in my experience. While the platform has its flaws, I don't see it being wrong to try and replicate.

Well the normal folks will care when one of the nerds creates something personally useful to them. Then that becomes the killer feature that makes the platform sticky.

Will this happen? No clue but it is cool to see someone innovating in this space. Let’s see what people come up with.

What happens when Community Notes gets "gamed" like what supposedly happens sometimes on ...Community Notes?

One example can be that there is a mass attempt at pushing some viewpoint, it may not stick long term but it sticks for the duration of time the content is viewed by the most amount of people. Kind of like how upvote bots mess with Reddit.

(1) people bring content over through screenshots and mirror accounts

(2) There is plenty of equivalent content

swap bsky for blebbit in the url bar

Are regular users adopting it? I’d never even heard of BlueSky before this thread.

Anyone on the ATProto network can write such an algorithm and use it in the Bluesky app. They even have open source starter code on their github

The thing other people care about is whether the platform has the people they want to follow on it.

bsky isn't there yet, but it's growing

attractive developer/nerd features often seeds developers to develop for the platform which will end up attracting more users.

Going with an email/calendar/contacts analogy:

Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.

And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).

Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).

Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.

Couldn't that be built over Mastodon?

> What I really like about it is the ATProto… DID, etc

Is the PLC DID (the one all bluesy accounts use) still hardcoded to a single centralised provider?

Ok, now I get it, I got it wrong. Still questionable, but for other reason: niche content (like, retrocomputing or pet spider care or just about anything that's less agreeable than funny kittens) would never come thru.

Echo chambers aren't intrinsically bad, only when it's about politics and social issues - i. e. stuff that will affect everyone in the end.

I don't think so, you can now run your own PDS with a limited number of users. There was a comment on another recent Bluesky HN story where someone reported that they offer instructions for doing his at sign up, iirc

Yes, lots of artists, teachers, econ, and NAFO. The British and Brazilians have had major influx over political spats with Musk

Major news orgs now have accounts too

It will be built on the labeller tech aiui, so there can be many community notes providers and systems, with users deciding which they want to follow

I'd love to hear what the Bluesky team thinks of Nostr. It seems pretty damning to me that a founder of Bluesky is now talking up the latter.

Dorsey didn't like the idea of moderation, which sure, probably isn't necessary for a while billionaire guy to feel safe.

Awesome, bookmarked!

Looking forward to login being oauth based, but from what I've vaguely remember skimming these weeks, that's an @proto limitation that is being worked on?!

Nostr is tied to the crypto coin crowd, which is largely off-putting to most people

Dorsey is certainly focused on that realm

OAuth is apparently implemented and we are waiting on documentation, soon (tm)

I also don't see anything wrong with trying to do that. I am talking about communication, not development. Mussolini probably used fountain pens, but I wouldn't advertise a pen as just the way Mussolini liked it!.

nostr's protocol is also fairly unstructured compared to atproto. ive researched bluesky, farcaster, and nostr, and their cultural origins have definitely impacted how they have approached their designs.

There is no predicting what approaches will win, but those 3 are the current viable options I think.

FYI I am part of the crypto crowd myself, but I am a SWE looking at these systems, not a CT gambler, lol.

Dorsey funded Bluesky and not much else.

Let back away a bit more. Isn't this how the Internet started?

I see a trend.

Oh, so what about the origins of Bluesky by the same founder(s) as Twitter ?

That alone gave me pause, as Twitter ended up as one of the most despicable platforms we have to suffer today (and yes, those issues are inherent in its nature, and long predate Musk buying it). But I guess that they might have learned from their mistakes this time ??