Ask HN: Bluesky Accounts Worth Following for HN Enthusiasts

I see a lot of people on Mastodon posting jokes about Twitter users moving to another centralised and venture capital-backed platform, like that "this time it will be different for sure!". I haven't read up on it myself so don't know what to think. Can someone burst my bubble on this?

Edit: saw a lot of valid responses, thanks! My question is answered and I might sign up on bsky as well if I get bored on Mastodon or want to connect with someone there :)

Personally I don't really care that Bluesky is centralized, I actually prefer it since it's easier to use and there isn't the risk that my random server admin is going to go rouge or shut down the server like you get with Mastodon.

Twitter was pretty much fine until Musk started shitting it up so something that is pretty much like Twitter pre Musk is all I want. Bluesky fills that position well.

I haven't seen those, mostly because finding people on Mastodon is impossible ;)

Maybe it will be different, maybe it won't. But the people moving to bsky care more about usability than they care about federation. They're not saying "this time will be different", they're picking a platform they feel comfortable using and don't care about VC money or not.

If that doesn't align with your values, maybe you don't want to join them. Because, yes, bsky is investor-financed, and at some point they'll need money. You might not agree with how they'll make that money, and it will be indeed no different. Your bubble is right on that.

If you're worried about your content on Bluesky or whatever getting hijacked, you should consider POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

(One of the strengths of Bluesky over X is that Bluesky currently doesn't punish people who link away from the site)

Mastadonians are being total sore losers , they're so proud that they're actually decentralized and self hosted (even tho most users are on mastadon.social)

IMO bluesky being a clone of Twitter in its UX means that you're going to get the same social dynamics, just a different group in charge of moderation decisions.

Bluesky is supposed to offer a different architecture of allowing users to decide what they see via shared blocklists and labeling services, but they still regularly ban right wingers, trolls, and griefers from having an identifier on their servers, and since there's no one hosting an alternate appview, it's Pretty Damned Centralized (tm) for the time being.

> they still regularly ban right wingers

No. There are plenty of conservatives on Bluesky and Threads.

They get banned when they cross the line and start being deliberately antagonistic.

>they're so proud that they're actually decentralized and self hosted (even tho most users are on mastadon.social)

Sorry, is any of that supposed to be wrong? People who use a decentralised platform aren't going to be fans of a new, mostly-centralised platform, I don't see how that's being sore losers. I also don't think most people on the Fediverse expect mainstream adoption any time soon, and many don't want it either.

Somehow the tone of your first paragraph doesn't match the content of the other two. They make it seem like the Mastodonians are pretty much Right™

Does Bluesky manipulate one’s feed or does it let it be based on the user’s subscriptions’ posts posted in reverse chronological order, filtered by the user’s preferences? Like Mastodon does?

I’m open to the possibility that Bluesky will go “bad” in some way.

Still not opposed to trying.

Gave up twitter long ago anyway.

They’re saying the talk about being distributed but generally congregate heavily on one (centralized) instance

I think it’s mistaken. You can run your own bluesky server, I’m meaning to get around to it but seems fairly straight forward:

https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

When I tried to install mastodon it downloaded literally hundreds of random dependencies, there was no way I could verify the security of it. Real shitshow imho.

It's the Team Fortress 2 paradox all over again. TF2 famously had a number of games all coming to dismantle its market dominance and each of them failed miserably. This might have seemed puzzling given TF2's somewhat antiquated gameplay and maps. It turns out that the magic sauce of TF2 was never the gameplay but instead the dogged and disciplined developer support from Valve over the years. For the latest example, look no further than Overwatch 2 killing itself with a greedy business model which, again, had nothing to do with the core game.

Likewise, Twitter is a very simple website to clone and compete with. Resisting the temptation to censor, putting in the effort to establish a non-exploitative business model, etc, is something that no one else has been able to do.

Your “following” is reverse chronological.

rogue.

Not only can you get reverse chronological feed, you can build your own feed with custom logic with a few clicks and share it with other people!

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-skyfeed#what-is-skyfeed

Awesome!

There’s a deep lesson in the victory of Bluesky over Mastodon about the general inability of Open Source projects to provide a simple, intuitive end user experience. It’s unsurprising for those of us who have participated in Open Souce for a while, but Bluesky vs. Mastodon will become the canonical example.

Bluesky lets you configure your feeds, or add new ones: https://bsky.app/feeds

Default Bluesky has the "Discover" feed and the "Following" feed. The "Discover" feed is the equivalent of the algorithmic "For you" feed in X, but you can always unpin it.

The "Following" feed is close to what you want I think.

What I hear is that there was an outage that took all of bsky down, as well as centralised moderation. Correct me if I'm wrong, or if it's still in the works, but it sounds like valid criticism when people say that demonstrates it functions as a centralised platform

Haven't tried self-hosting Mastodon since I was looking for a social platform and not a new hobby. There's lots of hosters to choose from though, including the usual suspects like German Tchncs and French La Quadrature du Net (they also host other alternatives to big tech platforms like peertube)

Mastodon users are really not happy that there's an alternative that might actually give users data sovereignty, wresting power away from people whose only way of relating to others is by exerting control over them.

Products go through lifecycles. I don't need to use them for their whole lifetimes, just while they are viable.

Many of us have probably experienced this with at least one major platform: Facebook. A score of years ago, it was considered cool. New platforms have taken their place: in fact, for a certain audience, Twitter was once the cool place they went to after fleeing Facebook.

For certain purposes, FB is dead. Same for Twitter. Now it's Bluesky's turn. It doesn't need to last for a century to be worth it.

Honestly I found starting my own mastodon server less work than trying to figure which of somebody else’s servers to use.

I’m not sure as to the future of bluesky, but they are committed to having a distributed network, and have been before they even launched.

I think claims to the contrary are sour grapes.

Where is this “victory” of bluesky over mastodon? IMO they are both losers and most likely stay losers (as in never be anywhere close to twitter).

Even the accounts posted here, signed up in 2023, posted on bluesky three times.

If anything, I at least know some people who seem to have found some small community amongst the mastodongers.

I don't see one or the other as having won or lost. I don't know anyone on bsky and various people on Mastodon, also before joining Mastodon about a year ago, but hear bsky is bigger on the whole. Probably a regional thing, and part of what I seek on this type of platform is local people and news. Heard of an open day of the Effelsberg radio telescope for example, which was a really nice experience and I'm not sure by what other means I could have learned of it (following all places of interest in a large radius separately perhaps? How would discovery of new places work?). It simply fulfills its purpose for me rather than being a "total sore loser"

I also really enjoy the inclusivity features like content warnings, filters, and alt texts. Didn't know I'd want these but it has been super nice around the USA election period, or when videos don't load on mobile data you can just read the text and know whether to bother with further attempts. Dunno if bsky has feature parity there or if people make use of it. My Mastodon instance in particular is quite... I don't want to say strict, but there's a good culture about it

It is sad, though, that you have to rebuild again after something like Facebook falls out of favor. Contacts get lost. I guess people will move to newer technologies than Mastodon as well, but so long as the concept is valid and the software maintained, transitioning to another instance is a feature of the system. I hear it has its issues but in general, you publish some redirect on your old profile (there's a button for doing it in your account settings) and then all followers will switch to the new location. You shouldn't have to start over from scratch in a normal case as migration is a foreseen situation

IMO Bluesky (really atproto) is decentralized along the axes that matter, while Mastodon is decentralized along the axes that don't. It's sort of a figure-ground inversion in thinking about a social media protocol so I think a lot of the criticism is coming from people who haven't taken any time to understand it.

It's an open protocol, but more like the www than email. You can port your identity to another host at any time. You can self host if you want. You have complete control over how your chosen feed algorithm aggregates posts from the firehose. If you want to make a competing service to Bluesky you can even do that, and it will still interoperate with all the Bluesky users.

Whereas with Mastodon, when you pick an instance you're essentially picking which benevolent dictator you want mediating your experience. Mastodon is decentralized in the sense that it breaks the platform up into smaller fiefdoms; Bluesky is decentralized in the sense that you retain control over your own experience.

Some recommended reading on Bluesky/atproto:

https://bsky.app/profile/laurenshof.online/post/3la5j3qgqvo2...

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-an...

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

> You can port your identity to another host at any time. You can self host if you want. You have complete control over how your chosen feed algorithm aggregates posts from the firehose. If you want to make a competing service to Bluesky you can even do that, and it will still interoperate with all the Bluesky users.

> Whereas with Mastodon, when you pick an instance you're essentially picking which benevolent dictator

Wait what? All of the benefits you mention for Bluesky apply equally to Mastodon (in both cases you can host your own thing if you like), and the latter (downside) applies to Bluesky when you sign up with the official server right? What's the difference you're pointing out?

I see why people might say it but "Bluesky is centralized" isn't an especially accurate criticism. The protocol allows essentially any aspect of Bluesky to be decentralized, up to and including starting a competing service that still interoperates with Bluesky users—no permission required.

The full thread has a lot of speculation without basis in fact (eg why a given VC decided to invest in bsky), and the primary technical argument involves some theoretical issues vis-a-vis rebuilding the network if 25%+ of users decide to migrate out.

I don’t put that much stock in such critiques when a project is still evolving, learning lessons, and most importantly growing.

Most of the complaints coming from the mastodon crowd feel more like emacs vs vim “debates” of yesteryear.

I suppose that time will tell. Twitter is in the midst of an experiment to see if social network effects will keep users around despite unlimited levels of political hostility, abuse, and algorithmic shenanigans from the ownership. My impression is that there’s a limit and we’ve crossed it post election as Bluesky has been gaining a million users each day, but my bias is showing.

I really think features, support, and functionality are secondary or tertiary effects at best, with the network-effect, first-to-market, winner-takes-all type mindshare stuff very very far ahead of them in impact. This also vaguely implies that features must be at least 10x better to make a meaningful difference.

Can you explain the differences in the “data sovereignty” story that bluesky does better than Mastodon?

I never see these discussions on bluesky or mastodon only here on Hacker News but it almost is never elaborated just that bluesky’s is better.

I was replying to a post claiming Bluesky is centralized, since it's not, really. Maybe I should have left Mastodon out of it :)

I think they're both good, but different tools for different jobs. Mastodon is good for tighter knit community. I think Bluesky has potential to be a decentralized replacement for social media with n >> dunbar's number.

The difference is in the protocol. Bluesky's atproto is IMO very clever and well designed. It's not every day I read something and think to myself, "I wish I'd thought of that!" I'd encourage anybody whose interest is piqued to dig in and read up.

Being on a large instance doesn't mean you don't care about decentralisation, you can still choose to migrate to a different instance if you want. The whole point is you're not locked in to one vendor and you can move if you want to, not that everyone should have to live on their own island

Besides everything else, there are only so many insane billionaires of sufficient insanity to buy and ruin a social network. Like, Dorsey was pretty odd, but that wasn't sufficient to totally ruin Twitter. Lightning, one might think, is somewhat unlikely to strike twice, and thus a realistic worst-case future for Bluesky is, more or less, old-Twitter.

Like, would I depend on Bluesky for anything important? No, of course not, that would be silly. But for use as a social network, it's sufficient, for now (I'm splitting my time between it and Mastodon; Bluesky is, generally, more _fun_.)

> Dunno if bsky has feature parity there or if people make use of it.

Alt text and filters, yes. Content warnings: currently only for posts with media; hopefully this gets addressed at some point: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/5341

Wasn't Bluesky developed in house by a paid team at Twitter, who also developed the protocol? And isn't its UX essentially a clone of Twitter's, which itself is the result of millions of dollars in R&D and proprietary labor? And isn't the existing familiarity with Twitter the only reason Bluesky's interface is "intuitive?"

A lot of the rough edges for Mastodon come from it actually being decentralized, and the extra complexity that brings. There is for all intents and purposes only one Bluesky instance, and there will likely only ever be one instance due to network effects. It's open source in the same way Reddit or HN are open source - the code is available, but there is only one implementation that matters.

I don't think you're entirely wrong - Mastodon could definitely do with better UX, but let's not pretend the playing field is level here. Bluesky's success is very much the result of corporate and proprietary development culture, advertising and startup hype, not of open source culture.

I kinda agree with that take, I just wanna bet on a new space, reset my algorithmic recommendations, plus find new accounts to read.

Sure… but you can see why it makes it hard to care (and in particular stomach the complexity of coming onboard)

There's one Bluesky appview and so far one public relay run by Bluesky.[0] There are over 1000 independent AT protocol instances and numerous independent appviews.

[0] Technically two if you count the development site.

[0a] New appview just dropped and it's Discord https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3lbfdkqinl22z

> What's the difference you're pointing out?

They don't equally apply.

> (in both cases you can host your own thing if you like), and the latter (downside) applies to Bluesky when you sign up with the official server right?

You can host things, sure, but atproto (this is really more about the protocol than the application layer) has true account portability, whereas Mastodon does not. Moving your account on Mastodon account has multiple options, all of which are closer to redirects: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

This all also requires cooperation from your host; if you're kicked out, then you can't do any of this. A profile redirect only stays up as long as that host is up.

Whereas with atproto, you can move between PDSes, and nothing will change with regards to your social graph. If your old PDS kicks you out or dies, you can recreate all of your data onto your new PDS by replaying it off of the relay.

That is, with Mastodon, your identity and your data storage are linked, so changing your identity requires changing your data storage, and changing your data storage requires changing your identity. But with atproto, these two things are separated, so changing one does not require changing the other.

Even if you sign up via bsky.app, there isn't even one official server: they partitioned their userbase among a bunch of different PDSes.

> What I hear is that there was an outage that took all of bsky down, as well as centralised moderation.

"all of" is accurate only in the sense that there's one major appview right now, but it wouldn't take down all of the independent PDS hosts. Anyone using an alternative appview wouldn't have been affected.

There is centralized moderation for the bluesky application, but not at the protocol level.

I wrote a bit about it up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42195601

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about this: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02...

Bluesky is not decentralized and the enshittification is very much expected: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178543

> Same for Twitter.

Dunno if they’re just lying but they keep claiming they’re breaking usage records

HN is not open source. Only the base software package is, the 'secret sauce' is proprietary.

> it downloaded literally hundreds of random dependencies, there was no way I could verify the security of it.

You just described any modern shitware that uses npm.

TF2 is still popular mainly because of the amazing gameplay.

> "this time it will be different for sure!".

This summer might be nice like last summer, but that doesn't mean that you a) need to believe that summer will last for ever or b) must pretend that it's not summer over there now.

In other words, who knows how long it will be good, enjoy it while it is and then move on.

yeah, they'll be pressed to turn a profit sooner or later. Consequences will flow from that.

> Moving your account on Mastodon account has multiple options, all of which are closer to redirects

My understanding is that Mastodon wants to build the feature where you truly move your data into a new identity. They have the export working, but not import. So ultimately this will work as well.

Twitter is a global social network. Clearly Musk made some very questionable business decisions e.g. changing the name, the aborted attempt to ban links to outside profiles, etc, but that period seems to have settled, and the main reason for leaving now is the rightward politicization.

If you live in the US then yes that's a seriously compelling reason to leave, but a large number of Twitter's users are not using English, they're not involved in US politics, and don't have much reason to switch unless Musk seriously upsets the operation of the platform.

Any thoughts on his observation that blue sky haven’t added a federated alternative to their server yet? Malice, incompetence or just low priority?

Don't know why you're being downvoted, every point is bang on.

Whatever. The original point I was trying to make was a comparison of usability between Bluesky and Mastodon. But everything has to be about Elon Musk, so here we are.

Why medium.com then for this article. Just $10 buys you a domain and enshittification shield.