The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver

A lot of commenters here are having their minds blown by this. And while I also love this I get the sense that many others here are maybe too young to remember that this kind of open access to data used to exist for lots websites. It inspired companion sites and loads of creativity. I find it tragic really, what the internet has become. I hope federated, and even more-so p2p, protocols take significant foothold on the internet and help revive this spirit of the web. The corpo-web is so fucking boring.

It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s.

I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.

>In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc.

Right. This is something I keep pointing out in threads about RSS. Some people will say RSS never left. Well, it left Twitter for one. Google News and Craigslist for others.

I almost wonder, to GP's point, if people have just completely forgotten all of this, which is why they think nothing was lost.

The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years.

We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily.

Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses.

We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.

This is just revisionist history.

We still have all the tools you talk about today. But with the benefit of much simpler languages and SDKs and tools like LLMs to help generate code. I've seen children learn programming far faster with Swift Playground on their iPad than I had to with C++ books.

And these sort of canned experience are what helped bring technology to everyone. Which was always supposed to be the main goal.