> The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns.

Which are...?

E2E Encryption is on the road map for Bluesky as it requires some protocol changes. The devs are encouraging people to use the DMs to exchange Signal info, and reminding people to not use DMs for sensitive info.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kt457v6aq72n

It's important though because it allows you to communicate things that don't really belong in the open while remaining under your identity on that platform and avoiding the need to link that identity with your identity on a different service.

Nowadays it's chat, photos/videos, and online purchases thus forming an all-in-one app. Not quite popular here in the West, though that's Elon's eventual goal with X. But think WeChat in China.

The original law fails for too many programs to be useful in its own, but why do you need some law to replace the obvious expectation that a social media program is going to do messages?

Video is the killer because it's expensive. Don't they still have no ads and only one paid feature, buying a custom domain name through them directly? Which nobody actually has to pay them for because you can link a domain name registered anywhere else for free.

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Disagreed - Mastodon has a major problem. The whole concept of server/instance is unnecessary and introduces extra complexity and hard problems.

Nostr has it right where servers/instances are completely interchangeable and all the hard work is done by the client.

I get why Mastodon had servers at the beginning - because browsers can't speak any other protocol than HTTP towards a single origin domain name. But this limitation fundamentally constrained the entire product into a corner that's very hard/impossible to back out of.

Mastodon should've been Nostr in the first place, with "instances" just being read-only views into the network (to satisfy browser's "demand" for an HTTP endpoint), but otherwise would be disposable and interchangeable - all write actions would be made by a client that doesn't have the constraints of a browser and can interact with the decentralized network over an appropriate protocol (and do the necessary cryptographic magic to ensure those peers are trustless and interchangeable).

The concept of "instances" not only introduces many user experience problems that makes it a non-starter for non-technical people (or even technical people who just don't have the time/willingness to deal with BS) but also open the door for politically-motivated feuds between instance admins to which the users are held hostage (instead of moderation being done on the client where the user is the only one in control of which "moderation feeds" they subscribe to, similar to an ad blocker list).

I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins.

Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to.

Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.

It's super american-centric too. For a "decentralized" platform that basically covers 2 small areas of the world is not a good sign. I feel like Bluesky had done nothing to address discoverability and sharing issues. Most engagement is centralized with 1% of shitposters.

From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn't work well globally.

Having tried both BlueSky and Mastadon I found Bluesky pretty easy to use and Mastadon bewildering. There were so many Mastadon servers I didn't know where to start. I guess maybe it doesn't matter what server something is on because the app can connect to all of them, but then discussion topics would be repeated in multiple places and it all seemed so disjoint. Like the chaos of old IRC networks but amplified. All in all I felt like a babe in the woods on Mastadon while Bluesky is pretty shamelessly just "Twitter minus Nazis". One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. While this might unfortunately facilitate creation of echo chambers it is a supremely powerful anti-troll tool.

The other big reason I went with Bluesky over Mastadon is that several of the people I used to follow on Twitter have moved over to Bluesky.

I think the primary difference is in the communities. Every six months or so I log back into Mastodon and the discussion there is one hard 'Nope' for me. I don't understand why I'd voluntarily read a platform where every other post is a 'call out' of something 'problematic' according to the warped world view of '@CatMomLibrarian' or something similar.

Cutting out the Nazis from Twitter is a great start, but Mastodon has done this by simply doubling down on the other end of the horseshoe. It's Truth Social for the other fringe.

BlueSky seems somewhat richer in normal people, but that probably won't last if the platform is successful over time. It seems in the nature of social networks to be taken over by parasitic outrage grifters.

My offer still stands to help the Bluesky folks implement these types of things if they can't figure it out. Call me!

They have a product, but do they have a business? I haven't kept up with them lately; do they have anything approaching a revenue model that would sustain them and provide good returns to their investors?

All of bluesky is MIT licensed (unless there's a subset I'm missing), and developed pretty openly. Heck, you could use DMs much earlier if you logged into main.bsky.dev (with an app password, ideally) rather than bsky.app.

They don't have E2EE yet, and use a different system than posting does on the site. (ergo, I think they're not in the firehose)

I know folks are hosting their own PDSs, at least in the sandbox, and I want to say in prod?

I'm not sure there are any non-bluesky Relays

I know folks are hosting their own labellers.

and I know folks are hosting their own appviews

I've seen repeated kerfuffles about people running mastodon-bluesky bridges

Yeah, I wrote my own PDS from scratch[0], that was capable of federating with the sandbox network.

Now that federation is enabled in the public network, I've been working on a slightly more production-ready rewrite[1], although it's not yet in a usable state (haven't had much time to work on it lately)

[0] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/picopds

[1] https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/millipds

I don't think this is the right place for that, but there are generally a bunch of libraries which will help you get this sorted out. If you tweet at me your tech stack and framework(s), I might be able to help you with more info. My details are in my bio.

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Can you only access it if you have an interesting story about a company you worked for in the bay area 10 years ago.

Absolutely! mrinfinity@micg.net

I'd give it a spin

Sure.

The headline is that it's not a shithole ridden with ads, spam, influencers, scams, etc. That's the important part of replacing Twitter.

Decentralized email, what will they think of next?

I went to Bluesky because some of my personal favorite non-tech Twitter personalties ended up there. I'm a fan of @Popehat, who has a lot of informed political legal commentary. There are also a number of fiction writers and artists I like there. Surprisingly full of the people I happen to want to subscribe to. And surprisingly large gardening and astronomy communities.

Less my thing, but if your interests include trans rights, furry porn, or romance authors, Bluesky's definitely the place for you.

Signing up went really well. Mastodon absolutely fumbled the Twitter disaster because it was difficult for non-technical people to figure out what to do. Bluesky just looks like Twitter unless you're actively looking for options to be on another server.

Where are the tech people using it? I've mostly only found bsky employees and politics doomscrollers...

i haven't seen tech people, save for the bsky devs. in my time building a client for it (as a side project), i observed a healthy population of journalists, furries, and people who have bad political takes.

when openai launched gpt-4o and google had its i/o, the two events didn't make a dent in the bsky trends. what did make a big dent was eurovision. that says a lot about the population of tech people.

It’s where a significant chunk of the writing community has ended up. I think people who feel the need to reach out to the public may still be more active on Twitter, but it’s definitely the online writers’ bar now.

Some of the photographers I follow now have accounts at Bluesky.

at least among the people I follow, there aren't really very many tech people. It's pretty much friendly enough for anyone to use imo.

I mean, sure if you want to run a PDS or labeller, that's basically technical folks only at this point, but I've seen non-technical people put together feeds, choose which labellers they want to pay attention to, etc.

but for just skeeting and BMing, it's user friendly

It's a stop-gap because people want DMs and implementing them correctly (decentralized, e2e encrypted, etc.) is non-trivial. Rushing e2e encryption is not a good idea (and no, you can't just slap on matrix/signal and call it a day).

The alternatives are to:

1. Wait a bit longer for something half-baked that appears to meet the goals (i.e., something you're going to regret but will be unable to replace). 2. Wait even longer for something perfect.

By making the protocol centralized and stupid-simple, it's also stupid-simple to replace in when everyone is done painting the perfect bikeshed.

I feel for them, because even if they (and weirdos like us on this site) value decentralization and other related values the average customer just DOES NOT CARE. They're trying to compete with other platforms without this handicap and very people people are willing to give them any "credit" for it

It's nice that they are being honest about how the existing thing is not encrypted. Typically what happens with these things is that some entity announces that they have end to end encryption. But it turns out that they mean that end to end encryption is only possible. The user has to compare some ridiculously long number to achieve it and few users actually end up doing that. In most cases they are not even provided with any concepts to allow them to initially make things secure and maintain this security over time.

Didn't the early versions of Skype, which was coded by like 4 guys, do decentralized end-to-end encrypted messaging like 20 years ago? Before MS bought it and removed all the security at the behest of the government[0], I mean.

So two decades later, when we now have so many widely available open source libraries for networking and encryption, that job is somehow too hard for a well-funded organization like Bluesky? That's very sad.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Eavesdropping...

They're not E2E yet, although they plan to introduce this later (and have had a good record so far of adding features incrementally with very few bugs). But you shouldn't be using any social media platform for communications that need to be secure.

Probably a noob question but: why is E2E encryption hard to implement? It took WhatsApp a long time to implement as well. Is there a particular reason?

I don’t think my wife would be happy with me getting a girlfriend.

>Twitter's good!

It's really not. It was good for a short while, way before the Muskquisition but the quality both of the service and of discourse have declined.

wasn't this fixed a few days ago? https://x.com/FirefoxSupport/status/1791459697297608943

firefox is my default browser, and i have the enhanced tracking protection to strict.

https://nitter.poast.org/ still seems to work

The only thing that has changed with Twitter is who gets banned.

This could also be seen as a weakness. The lack of focus means fragmentation. Fragmentation means confusion. Users tend to want/need to know what to use and where to go. Telling someone, "go get an email account," will leave them asking more questions or giving up. It's a homework assignment for research. Telling someone, "go get a gmail account," is an actionable thing they can do. We made it there with email, but they were news anchors trying to explain it to people and a lot of friends helping friends, or simply ISPs setting it up for their customers. It's been 30 years of mainstream awareness.

If someone said, "I'm on Nostr," and I wanted to join them, then I found that page you linked to... now what? What is a Zap? Is this some kind of crypto nonsense? "amount in sats"... what's a sat? I just went to what was supposed to be a reddit clone and there were 0 posts. Another one is just a chess board. What is this supposed to be, the user asked? I'm already annoyed by this. "Here are 90 sites, go find the 1 that might not be a ghost town that will also let you talk to your friends." This is a bad first impression, and it's not even my first time hearing about it.

The public will never be sold on a protocol, there needs to be that one killer app that brings people in, and if the protocol is flexible to allow for more things, great.

At this point why use nostr over ActivityPub?

> Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees?

99% of social media on the English-speaking web is basically American politics obsessed, if you don't want that you need to branch out to other languages.

My experience is that it's the opposite. My twitter timeline got filled up with blue checkmarks spamming their things. Their comments are boosted in every discussion. And since it's a certain demographic that pays for twitter blue, it completely altered everything. So at least in my circles it's to get away from all the hate and outrage that was just to gain virality, and get back to actual discussions on the topics we care about (which is far from US politics).

pretty much, the same rational and objective (and fact based!) political views you can read on hn

> I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO

You'll be pleased to learn that Bluesky sign-up has been open to all without invitation since last February.

> something else will come along and eat their lunch

It already happened.

Whilst Bluesy was requiring invites, Threads launched and now has the highest DAUs of all of the text social networks.

Its no longer invite only.