I can't tell why the writers feel that Bluesky's AT protocol is somehow the technologically best, or most politically strategic foundation, for a viable open mechanism for this kind of communication.
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that simple.
If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful.and who's not.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.
Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a bug.
Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.
I do not think that for service to be dependent on some particular company is successful way to do it. It is successful to deliver some kind of service but, as we have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does not have desired outcome.
Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.
>Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling
While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.
Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.
Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.
It's because people don't care about federated services, they care about services that are easy to use and have people on them and that's bluesky right now
Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?
I think Mastodon lost the herd trust when it pivoted away from global federation and made confession of allegiance a firm requirement. They killed the canary and people left.
Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?
Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.
Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.
I don’t understand the question. You are currently using one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet complaining that another platform which allows individuals to create their own clients which to view content published on the protocol has servers that you are not required to use that are too moderated?
in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)
ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.
ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.
I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.
Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also APub based).
Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets, blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all this activity, is that by your definition segregationist and a dead canary?
I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.
> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.
The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.
And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized.
It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.
I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part.
ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.
I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
Who's this "we"? Is there anything that runs on the Bluesky protocol outside of the Bluesky itself which has its own extensions which can't be federated. Also, when I opened this site, all the posts were from a certain political ideology. The algorithm is probably more or less the same as Twitter in pushing contents loved by their creators.
Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms. Now, not only can you subscribe to those with like opinions, but the collective can reject dissenting opinions en masse. What could go wrong?
The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Usenet had kill files. It was invented before the Internet was widespread. There was even a term, plonk, for adding someone usually as parting message.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
> The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
depends on the trustworthiness of the source. at some point we have to trust something; could be our own selection process, but it can very well be the opinion of someone who you follow that seem genuine over X amount of time. The false positives are probably a necessary evil, humans will make mistakes, miss sarcasm, etc.
The internet of the 2000s was good because it didn't have these "discover" and "for you" algorithms. If you were interested in a subject, you actually had to search and filter results to find what you wanted; no AI choosing for you. If you're not interested in politics, you shouldn't see political content, unless you specifically search for it.
Doubt it, Twitter had that feature years ago and there wasn't a major problem that linked to it.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
> Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
I get this, and I use bsky. What I don't understand is why some of my more liberal friends have a meltdown when I tell them I successfully use Twitter for what I want to get out of: instant news and commentary, some memes, some Instagram like feeds, and a couple of other things. I don't use the firehouse feed, I just pay attention to those I follow and have almost zero issues.
Shared blocklists are older than social media; in particular see USENET killfiles, which were often shared. More recently, you had user-made shared blocklists on Twitter until Musk broke the API. There’s nothing particularly new about them, though having them as a convenient first-class feature is somewhat new.
They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI evangelists).
Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
HN is heavily echo chamber. Just because some people agree/disagree on technical topics doesn't mean you're getting a true diversity of opinions. Like, say, from the 99.99...% of the population that don't know what an int is.
As much as I like and enjoy HN most of the time, it's very much an echo chamber. Even if we ignore politics and politics-adjacent threads and focus on tech stuff, there are some popular perceptions/opinions that have not earned their popularity, and god help you should you suggest you're not on that bandwagon. The blanket ban on outright politics here may blunt the echo chamber effect a bit, but it exists because echo chamber susceptibility is part of the human condition. We cannot get away from it.
While there's a ban on overt politics, a lot of social discourse is ultimately political.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
Yes try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's actions caused significant harm and really only helped adversaries - to give two examples.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
Educated people will remain educated. Ignorant people will remain ignorant. Angry people will remain angry. Block lists aren’t going to make a material difference in winning hearts and minds. The average reading level in the United States is between 7th and 8th grade, for example. Users will pick what they want to read, and they should be able to.
Seems to be the wrong measure for the angry dopamine machine. I should’ve mentioned critical thinking and emotional intelligence as well in my first comment. Citations below.
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
The comments on that post (I saw the same or similar on Reddit) point out that there are very aggressive lists and more discerning lists. Some lists filter out based on links in a profile or certain emojis or if you follow certain accounts.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
From my admittedly subjective perspective, it's the lesser of two evils. The alternative of having centralized control of "truth" is a far more awful option.
Agreed. Bluesky is useless for this reason and the way that blocking works individually as well.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
if alice blocks bob:
it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
yes, alice has autonomy over who participates on conversations she started. bob is still free to have the same conversation, just not on alice's conversations or as replies to her.
i dont't think we're going to agree on why people generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's coversations it's just because no one asked you to be part of that conversation and now you lost your access privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
It actually has worked well for me, and I've had some interesting discussions on there and some arguments, but over facts and not emotions. I think people have a right to express their opinions, but they don't have a right to make me hear what they're saying if they're known belligerents, spreaders of disinformation, or similar things.
Musk Social provides some options for you to control who can reply to your posts (like followers only), at least it did before I nuked all my accounts.
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
You have misunderstood. The way Bluesky blocking works is not just about controlling who else can interact with your posts, it affects the posts of others too, and applies to every other user whether they like it or not.
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
The beauty of ATProto is that you can build an alternative App View that handles blocks differently. The Bluesky app is open source so you don't have to start from scratch either.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
What's this "costly barrier to entry"? It is certainly not a given from where I am looking
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
The omission of blocked posts is done server-side by the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint, so you'd need to reimplement that to return the content of blocked posts instead, both upthread (parent) and downthread (replies). It would require acquiring and maintaining your own replica of the data, which is hundreds of gigabytes in size.
This is significantly more complex than making a few small changes to the frontend app.
The filtering of blocked replies is done server-side. You can view whatever top-level posts you want in the protocol; making those visible/invisible is up to the client software.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I just validated this to be the true. This because I have not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's more work to actually respect the blocking.
The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
You seem really misinformed about all of this.
Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this on HN lately
Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A. The entire subthread starting with user B's response to user A is removed, which includes making the discussion between user A and user C no longer viewable in that thread, to anyone:
Having to visit the Replies page of user C and try to piece together snippets of conversation - some of which are still unviewable - is not a reasonable solution. In particular, posts 7 and 8 are not there and the link between posts 1 and 2 is severed.
That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If you don't like it, use a different social media platform
That it's unreasonable to expect users to mitigate this by hunting around others' profiles for snippets of conversation is my opinion, yes.
That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact that this is done server-side via the getPostThread endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields of the response are omitted.
This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
You said posts were blocked when what you are actually describing is replies being disconnected from a post on that post. They are still visible within the network
It's working as expected
You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new account
Everyone in life has a blocklist, and they are shared.
You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid, when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x, they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or reject the point they made.
However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive you away.
It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society. The only way we can function is by having effective way to have some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)
Framing bluesky as a "competitor" to mastodon makes about as much sense as framing a quarterback making the winning run as "beating" the kid drawing clouds in the bleachers.
They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the game.
With it seeming like even fewer powerful people will control how social media is moderated, as they say depending on the “policy environment” there’s never been a more important time to work towards distributed social media.
Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user. There is also the issue that your account is tied to a specific server and migration means you lose your followers. Discovery and server DDoS on a viral post are also challenges for the way ActivityPub was architected.
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
It's really not complicated, that article is just being excessively verbose for clarity. The UI itself explains it very well, it takes just a couple of minutes to log into both servers and set up the transfer.
> Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user.
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes. You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
> The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes.
Moderation policies change even with the big ones (Twitter, etc).
I suspect you're referring to the confusion due to different servers having different moderation policies, and that could effectively make you invisible to others or vice versa merely by being on a given server.
First, my guess is that this is a problem with a tiny percentage of servers. I've not had to deal with this even once.
Second, when you say you "heard others bring it up", my guess is these others are highly technical folks. Not a single "average" person stayed away from Mastodon due to this. I suspect perhaps 99% of active Mastodon users are not even aware of this.
These are valid criticisms of Mastodon. But they're not the reason people didn't sign up for it. Name recognition is.
> You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
FYI, for quite a while now you can switch servers, and have the followers automatically follow your new account.
Level of de-centralization Bluesky has is somewhere between the old Twitter and Ethereum, neither of which have strong resistance against central decision making.
The problem discussed here is that Mastodon is not simply de-centralized, but its superstructure upholds a segregation policy and loves to ostracize admins based on, ahem, preferences. This in turn encourage admins to join a virtue signaling zeitgeist, and towards assuming more divisive and dismissive stances, out of fear. As a second order effect, regular non-admin users and their ability to communicate would be not only at whim of the server owner but also that of the inner group cast towards the admin.
Bluesky doesn't have this type of problem, precisely because it's not too decentralized. Either you individually get banned or not, based on levels of value alignment between you and the corpo outsourced moderators. There are also blocklist feature as well as third party voluntarily applicable moderation framework in Bluesky, but personally I can't imagine majority of users using it, or dividing the network into fragmented subgroups, and are non-factors in the grand scheme of things.
(By the way, I sometimes wonder how moderator value alignment is going to inevitably drift over time; as I understand it, social media content moderation is partially automated and exploitatively outsourced to workers from low income regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon is almost exclusively discussed in context of human rights and fair worker treatment, but I think this also means a lot of people with minimal prior exposure to media, let alone the anaerobic layer of the Internet, are being trained to develop preferences on such content and especially the more flaggable yet less hateful and flaggable-but-less-flag-deserving content. i.e. stimulative but not blood and gore. If anyone is reading down to this line, you know what I mean.)
Subscribing to a labeller is as easy as following any other account. I use several 3rd party moderation services. The bar to adoption is much lower than I think you anticipate
Bluesky has an initial PDS anyone can run, available on their github. Last I checked they said not to host more than 10 accounts during the beta testing. You can absolutely migrate your account and still use the Bluesky app. The custom server is an option at login
> I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
> In terms of content moderation, posts related to child sexual abuse or terrorism are best handled by professionals trained to help keep millions or billions safe.
Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?
They're right that they need to actually shift the power away from Bluesky and have users use other servers.
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
I have been saying the same things for over a decade, and writing about it. But more importantly - I built the alternative, we’ve tested it with lots of local communities and will be going to market Nov 5th this year
I can already tell that whilst reactionary propaganda will now be allowed on the platform, any anti-genocide activism will be quietly censored. It's like I can already taste it.
> The internet doesn’t need to be like this. As luck would have it, a new way is emerging just in time. If you’ve heard of Bluesky...
Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?
Perhaps because, in terms of numbers, they don't?
Deceptive. Half the tech people I used to follow on Twitter now post exclusively on Mastodon.
don't forget SOLID from W3C!
https://solidproject.org
https://github.com/solid
I lost interest in Bluesky when I got an “account required” blocker after I clicked on a Bluesky post link.
This is a per-account flag that's only honoured by the official web app and some third party ones
Interesting given I can access this[1] without an account.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3lfdz...
Why would we want to protect a protocol that isn't federated in any meaningful way?
I can't tell why the writers feel that Bluesky's AT protocol is somehow the technologically best, or most politically strategic foundation, for a viable open mechanism for this kind of communication.
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Because no one's actually going to Mastodon. It's really that simple.
If you wanna delve into the details of why people so often avoid the platforms that FOSS enthusiasts tend to recommend, that's an interesting question, but we gotta be clear here, we already knows who's successful.and who's not.
> The diversity is astounding
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that there are people who say they are in favour of diversity but underneath only want their kind of diversity, not genuine diversity.
Diversity of opinion would definitely be a feature, not a bug.
It kind of doesn't matter why people are rallying around BlueSky but simply that they are.
Disagree.
I’ll take this all seriously when people admit what the real drivers are. Admit why people are actually looking for an X alternative.
It’s a mix of ideologues, performative outrage, foot stomping, and wanting the 2020 status quo.
It sounds like you’re saying that Bluesky users are actually just throwing a giant fit.
That has not been my experience at all.
Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.
TruthSocial is a forked Mastodon
They've disabled federation and replaced the frontend with an alternative. They just needed something that worked out of the box.
I do not think that for service to be dependent on some particular company is successful way to do it. It is successful to deliver some kind of service but, as we have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does not have desired outcome.
Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.
>Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling
While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.
Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.
Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.
99% of normies don't want to decide what dictatorial fiefdom (server) they wish to belong to.
99% of normies can just pretend that mastodon.social is “Mastodon.”
It's because people don't care about federated services, they care about services that are easy to use and have people on them and that's bluesky right now
Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?
Perhaps they recognize that a perfect decentralized platform without users doesn't matter as much as pushing the platforms being used to improve
> techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles
It’s called “marketing” and “paid-for articles”
I think Mastodon lost the herd trust when it pivoted away from global federation and made confession of allegiance a firm requirement. They killed the canary and people left.
What confession? Link? I haven’t heard of this
I'm referring to mass defederation, defederation list sharing and mutual surveillance that followed it.
That’s literally the moderation model of federated networks at work.
Each instance chooses to adopt defederating lists.
If you don’t like that make your own instance.
Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?
Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.
I'm not sure I follow you. It sounds like you expect to receive from every instance, and in turn expect all to receive from yours?
I don't see the appeal; it sounds like it would devolve into white noise
Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.
Are there thousands of HN?
I don’t understand the question. You are currently using one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet complaining that another platform which allows individuals to create their own clients which to view content published on the protocol has servers that you are not required to use that are too moderated?
in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)
ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.
ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.
I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.
Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also APub based).
Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
1: https://instances.social/list/advanced#min-users=100000
If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets, blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all this activity, is that by your definition segregationist and a dead canary?
I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.
Link please?
> To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
Mastodon has many MANY MANY issues.
The first is that instance operators regularly abuse their users as hostages in personal petty fights. I don't care too much about drama, but there has been a lot of it regarding Israel/Palestine or Ukraine/Russia and instances defederating from each other as a result of said drama.
The second one is instances can go down for whatever reason - the admins just being unable/unwilling to cope with moderation, running out of money, getting into trouble with the legal system, ... - and users can't move their post, DM and media history to another instance.
And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.
Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.
Bluesky also has but a handful of engineers
The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized.
It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.
I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.
Nostr sadly doesn't scale. IMO it's a better system for decentralized account identity lookup but not great for content delivery. It needs something else for the content part.
ATproto allows data to be hosted off-site but account lookup goes through the Bluesky owned centralized infra. Just my hunch but maybe its "federation" aims is just a sugarcoated version of "it's a carbon copy of late 2010s Twitter microservices, but we're building it on public IP with intentionally minimal authentication".
Bluesky is two completely separate things:
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.
Would be silly for anyone to take the other side of that bet. It's clear most people don't care. Early on I tried to explain to people why their feature requests didn't make sense in the federated design, but eventually I gave up. And to some extent Bluesky gave up as well. People were demanding DMing be a feature of the site so eventually they just added DMs that are centrally stored on their servers.
And rightfully so, because it’s a stupid feature to not have and most people want an app not an ideology.
I got the impression from Christine Webber that the Blue sky protocol could not practically be federated, there's a bottleneck (relays iirc) that can only be properly implemented with huge resources, and which scales quadratically
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Discussed a bit here:
How decentralized is Bluesky really? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215410 - Nov 2024 (16 comments)
Bluesky is designed for the appearance of federation.
Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that’s not actually true either.
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
Who's this "we"? Is there anything that runs on the Bluesky protocol outside of the Bluesky itself which has its own extensions which can't be federated. Also, when I opened this site, all the posts were from a certain political ideology. The algorithm is probably more or less the same as Twitter in pushing contents loved by their creators.
Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms. Now, not only can you subscribe to those with like opinions, but the collective can reject dissenting opinions en masse. What could go wrong?
Twitter had shared block lists for a long time before they were removed.
Twitter was better then.
We don't have to guess how that works, it existed.
Better for you? Better for discourse? Better for protecting your echo chamber from things that might challenge you?
the "collective" has been able to block out toxic shit for a while
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing https://web.archive.org/web/20250107144929/https://blocktoge... https://web.archive.org/web/20241230160146/https://gardenfen...
folks just get riled up when their diatribes don't get traction
The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
Usenet had kill files. It was invented before the Internet was widespread. There was even a term, plonk, for adding someone usually as parting message.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
> The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
depends on the trustworthiness of the source. at some point we have to trust something; could be our own selection process, but it can very well be the opinion of someone who you follow that seem genuine over X amount of time. The false positives are probably a necessary evil, humans will make mistakes, miss sarcasm, etc.
The internet of the 2000s was good because it didn't have these "discover" and "for you" algorithms. If you were interested in a subject, you actually had to search and filter results to find what you wanted; no AI choosing for you. If you're not interested in politics, you shouldn't see political content, unless you specifically search for it.
Doubt it, Twitter had that feature years ago and there wasn't a major problem that linked to it.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
> Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
I get this, and I use bsky. What I don't understand is why some of my more liberal friends have a meltdown when I tell them I successfully use Twitter for what I want to get out of: instant news and commentary, some memes, some Instagram like feeds, and a couple of other things. I don't use the firehouse feed, I just pay attention to those I follow and have almost zero issues.
Maybe they think Musk is a fascist? The better question is why you don't care.
Shared blocklists are older than social media; in particular see USENET killfiles, which were often shared. More recently, you had user-made shared blocklists on Twitter until Musk broke the API. There’s nothing particularly new about them, though having them as a convenient first-class feature is somewhat new.
They help make Bluesky usable; for instance I subscribe to one which nukes transphobes, because, really, I do not have the patience to listen to their One Joke anymore, thanks. And another which warns on people with AI-generated profile pics (these are virtually always some form of scammer, or, worse, AI evangelists).
The blocklists are not mandatory.
Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
HN is heavily echo chamber. Just because some people agree/disagree on technical topics doesn't mean you're getting a true diversity of opinions. Like, say, from the 99.99...% of the population that don't know what an int is.
Believe it or not, I find most of my disagreement on social issues rather than technical topics on HN and I am a fairly conventional social democrat.
As much as I like and enjoy HN most of the time, it's very much an echo chamber. Even if we ignore politics and politics-adjacent threads and focus on tech stuff, there are some popular perceptions/opinions that have not earned their popularity, and god help you should you suggest you're not on that bandwagon. The blanket ban on outright politics here may blunt the echo chamber effect a bit, but it exists because echo chamber susceptibility is part of the human condition. We cannot get away from it.
While there's a ban on overt politics, a lot of social discourse is ultimately political.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
Yes try making a comment in favor of bulk data collection by the intelligence agencies, or stating that Snowden's actions caused significant harm and really only helped adversaries - to give two examples.
Even if you write a well argued and decently sourced comment, it's very likely to get flagged by people with ideological disagreements to this. And there are a lot of them on HN, so your comment will likely disappear pretty quickly.
You call it "social media echo chamber" I call it "not exposing myself, family, or friends to gore or lewd content".
Sounds better than everyone outsourcing the same to Musk, Zuck, spez, or similar.
Educated people will remain educated. Ignorant people will remain ignorant. Angry people will remain angry. Block lists aren’t going to make a material difference in winning hearts and minds. The average reading level in the United States is between 7th and 8th grade, for example. Users will pick what they want to read, and they should be able to.
I wonder what’s the max lexile score for 144 characters
Seems to be the wrong measure for the angry dopamine machine. I should’ve mentioned critical thinking and emotional intelligence as well in my first comment. Citations below.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-thinkin...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07779
I noticed that those blocklist on Bluesky tends to have false positives too!
I've seen an instance where an innocent user added to a blocklist that blocks Nazi ideology or something like that.
Honestly if that happened to me, I'd quit Bluesky instantly
There are lots of lists like that. Like I stumbled across this one the other day titled "Pedophiles of Bluesky" at https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:zufzme6bw4kqvd7uwff3qfpc/li...
Now I had a good look and I'm pretty sure the people added to this list haven't posted anything to warrant this accusation. Yet if you go to their profiles on Clearsky or whatever it will show them in this pedophile list, like https://clearsky.app/messyjhesse.bsky.social/lists
That's not right, and the worst thing is you can't see on the app if you've been wrongly labeled that way, you have to use a third-party website to find out.
The comments on that post (I saw the same or similar on Reddit) point out that there are very aggressive lists and more discerning lists. Some lists filter out based on links in a profile or certain emojis or if you follow certain accounts.
These are 3rd party lists and a user has to opt into them to leverage their blocking choices. If a list blocks 1M accounts but only has 100 followers, it's not such a big deal.
When you subscribe to a well built list, you are given options for how like mute vs block, your choice, or label | warn | hide, per label, a subchoice within an opt in labeller.
What ATProto gives us as users is choice and competition. Bad lists will not gain subscribers and will be marginalized by the market effect. High quality lists will be shared and gain network effect.
We shouldn't expect or want a one-size fits all solution to moderation. Our social graphs in real life and online are not a giant blob where everyone has to listen to everyone. We naturally break down into subgraphs or communities. Online communities or groups should be able to exclude people for any reason they wish. They should be seen similar to a private group in real life. You shouldn't expect to be allowed into or to participate in a group if your going against the group's rules or customs in real life. Online should be no different.
https://sites.google.com/view/sources-why-we-hate-each-other... § The Myth of the Filter Bubble
From my admittedly subjective perspective, it's the lesser of two evils. The alternative of having centralized control of "truth" is a far more awful option.
This is solved by blocking everyone by default and invites via some temporary UUID that you can use to add someone.
I'm sure that blocking everyone by default will really help them attract users...
Echo chamber or filtering out noise?
Yeah, I don't want to see spam and inane posts, it isn't some moral imperative that everyone gets exposed to every thought someone shits out.
Agreed. Bluesky is useless for this reason and the way that blocking works individually as well.
Imagine if HN had a "block" option you could select against a user, that when you click it, it wipes out every comment that this user ever made on a post that you both commented in, past and future - but not just for you, for every other HN user as well. And there's no "showdead" option to see them either, for anyone.
Like if I or anyone who replied to you blocked you now, with this hypothetical Bluesky-like feature on HN, no-one at all would be able to see your comment. Except maybe dang if he went poking around in the database.
That's basically how Bluesky blocks work. It's absurd.
this is false
if alice blocks bob: it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts; blocks bob from replying to future posts of alice; but more importantly it erases bob from alice's feed wich is often the only healthy thing to do because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
It is not false.
> it hides all posts bob made in response to alice posts
Exactly, it hides these from anyone else who might read the thread, including others participating in the thread.
This offers Alice not just the means to control her own Bluesky experience, but also to unilaterally control which parts of the conversation that all others on Bluesky can see.
It is in effect a feature to selectively delete the posts of others for any reason.
> because bob is a deranged lunatic and alice does not owe bob the attention he seeks
That is generally not the reason why users on Bluesky hit the block button. There's a strong tendency there of blocking because someone disagrees with you, or they explained why you're wrong about something, or they pointed out that you're spreading misinformation.
On Bluesky, blocking is a way to quickly and conveniently hide any dissent.
yes, alice has autonomy over who participates on conversations she started. bob is still free to have the same conversation, just not on alice's conversations or as replies to her.
i dont't think we're going to agree on why people generaly block others. you seem to see yourself as some sort of dissenter, or a truth-teller of some kind, but when you get blocked for interjecting into someone else's coversations it's just because no one asked you to be part of that conversation and now you lost your access privileges. this rejection probably fucks with your self-esteem more than it should but i'm no therapist so maybe go find one instead of annoying folks on the internet.
It actually has worked well for me, and I've had some interesting discussions on there and some arguments, but over facts and not emotions. I think people have a right to express their opinions, but they don't have a right to make me hear what they're saying if they're known belligerents, spreaders of disinformation, or similar things.
Should people who disagree with your opinions be able to stop others from reading your opinions? As that's what the Bluesky block feature does.
You might be responding to a spreader of disinformation with facts, but if they then block you, no-one else will be able to read your response.
Musk Social provides some options for you to control who can reply to your posts (like followers only), at least it did before I nuked all my accounts.
Bluesky provides a richer set of options. I should be able to choose who interacts with my posts. If that's not your style, fine, there are other options out there. Bluesky users like this feature. It reduces the toxicity and makes it a more enjoyable platform.
The culture around "don't engage, just block" the trolls helps keep the discourse more civil. With a fresh start, we can stay ahead of the trolls and bots. It's a group effort
You have misunderstood. The way Bluesky blocking works is not just about controlling who else can interact with your posts, it affects the posts of others too, and applies to every other user whether they like it or not.
See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021 for more detail.
A relevant comment from that issue:
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
> Just the other day I got a notification, and I clicked on it, and once again, the post they were replying to was "blocked", not because of me, but because the person who made the post blocked the person they were responding to. I was trying to make sense of their post, but now I couldn't as I had no idea what the hell they were replying to... then I think I found the post they replied to; it showed "1 reply", but when I clicked on it, no replies were shown.
> Now, this functionality was probably done with good intentions - but you know what they say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Another comment explaining the problem:
> This is working as intended but I agree it should be reassessed. For example:
> 1. In a popular thread, User A posts some nonsense
> 2. User B replies to that reply explaining why it's nonsense
> 3. User A blocks User B
> 4. Now User A has successfully hidden the rebuttal to his comment from everyone. The only defense against this is if the thread OP happens to block User A.
> This is a pretty serious downside of the "nuclear block" system imo. It creates an escalation ladder of blocking where the first user to hit "block" is advantaged. On the other hand it causes me personally to avoid blocking where I otherwise would, because I want the conversation to still be visible for others.
> There should at least be a "show reply" button on posts that are hidden for this reason IMO. Otherwise you've given every user the unilateral power to hide a reply, for everyone, permanently. If I hide a reply the normal way, it's not deleted for everyone! There is a "show hidden reply" button! The effect of hiding someone else's reply should be consistent across these two ways to do it.
The beauty of ATProto is that you can build an alternative App View that handles blocks differently. The Bluesky app is open source so you don't have to start from scratch either.
Choice and competition will make this network a better long-term social fabric than the centralized systems we are used to.
What is the incentive to do that, given the costly barrier to entry in both developer time and computing resources?
What's this "costly barrier to entry"? It is certainly not a given from where I am looking
By any account, it is far less than building an independent social network application. The components are also decoupled so you don't have to rebuild everything. If you want to build an App View, it's just a webapp or react native. You don't have to rebuild everything
re: incentives, there are many, people have different perspectives and motivations to do so
The omission of blocked posts is done server-side by the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint, so you'd need to reimplement that to return the content of blocked posts instead, both upthread (parent) and downthread (replies). It would require acquiring and maintaining your own replica of the data, which is hundreds of gigabytes in size.
This is significantly more complex than making a few small changes to the frontend app.
The filtering of blocked replies is done server-side. You can view whatever top-level posts you want in the protocol; making those visible/invisible is up to the client software.
If I post something that gets traction, and someone replies with an ad for ED pills, I should be able to remove that spam from the discussion on my thread and not just from my view of it. If others have already "engaged" with a plug for boner pills, their replies are not lost but are just no longer part of the thread stemming from my post.
If you as the OP don't want this behavior, there are other tools at your disposal (mute the replier instead, "hide for everyone", etc).
This is absolutely and provably wrong.
I have written my own webapp (https://blebbit.com) and I can see content and accounts I have blocked on Bluesky. I just validated this to be the true. This because I have not implemented block respecting in my own code yet. It's more work to actually respect the blocking.
The full backup of ATProto is more than 5T now.
You seem really misinformed about all of this.
Or maybe you created an account to intentionally spread falsehoods about Bluesky? There has been a flurry of this on HN lately
No, this is not wrong. I will demonstrate. Here is a sample conversation between three users A, B, and C:
https://i.ibb.co/CJkZWBG/image.png
No-one has blocked anyone at this point, so the conversation is visible to all parties and any onlookers.
Your own app shows the same:
https://i.ibb.co/3kxp5Q9/image.png
Now for whatever reason, user B decides to block user A. The entire subthread starting with user B's response to user A is removed, which includes making the discussion between user A and user C no longer viewable in that thread, to anyone:
https://i.ibb.co/j6f9z92/image.png
This appears exactly the same in your app:
https://i.ibb.co/2Px9bw5/image.png
The root cause is that the app.bsky.feed.getPostThread endpoint omits the entire tree of replies for that subthread in its response:
https://i.ibb.co/F45n6QV/image.png
Please feel free to verify this in your own browser and explain why you believe this to be incorrect.
yet... https://ibb.co/h8JWzHH
Having to visit the Replies page of user C and try to piece together snippets of conversation - some of which are still unviewable - is not a reasonable solution. In particular, posts 7 and 8 are not there and the link between posts 1 and 2 is severed.
> not a reasonable solution
That's your opinion. The vast majority of ATProto users like the enhanced controls over their conversations. If you don't like it, use a different social media platform
That it's unreasonable to expect users to mitigate this by hunting around others' profiles for snippets of conversation is my opinion, yes.
That one user blocking another user makes chunks of the conversation disappear for everyone else viewing the thread is verifiable fact. As it is a verifiable fact that this is done server-side via the getPostThread endpoint, by which posts in the parent and replies fields of the response are omitted.
This is not "absolutely and provably wrong", as you put it. Maybe do some research yourself before accusing others of intentionally spreading falsehoods?
You said posts were blocked when what you are actually describing is replies being disconnected from a post on that post. They are still visible within the network
It's working as expected
You have made multiple other inaccurate statements about Bluesky / ATProto throughout your comments with your new account
Everyone in life has a blocklist, and they are shared.
You have a list of public people that piss you off and avoid, when you are asked about them you say "ugh I don't like x because". Now, you might get someone say "dont be mean about x, they had y, which is why they did z" and you might accept or reject the point they made.
However that person is unlikely to blast you with content or facts to do with said public figure, unless they want to drive you away.
It is part of human nature, infact its the basis of society. The only way we can function is by having effective way to have some shared core "principles" (formally around religion, feudal chiefs, now around semi cult leaders) This means rejecting other ideas as heretical. (see civil rights marches, universal suffrage, silver/gold standard the fracturing of protestantism)
Framing bluesky as a "competitor" to mastodon makes about as much sense as framing a quarterback making the winning run as "beating" the kid drawing clouds in the bleachers.
They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the game.
With it seeming like even fewer powerful people will control how social media is moderated, as they say depending on the “policy environment” there’s never been a more important time to work towards distributed social media.
I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.
Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user. There is also the issue that your account is tied to a specific server and migration means you lose your followers. Discovery and server DDoS on a viral post are also challenges for the way ActivityPub was architected.
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
You can migrate your account on masto without loosing followers https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-anot...
You can, but as that document makes clear, it is very complicated to move an account and to do it right.
It's really not complicated, that article is just being excessively verbose for clarity. The UI itself explains it very well, it takes just a couple of minutes to log into both servers and set up the transfer.
After you pick a server is there anything else that makes it hard?
> Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user.
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
Marketing.
The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes. You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
> The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes.
Moderation policies change even with the big ones (Twitter, etc).
I suspect you're referring to the confusion due to different servers having different moderation policies, and that could effectively make you invisible to others or vice versa merely by being on a given server.
First, my guess is that this is a problem with a tiny percentage of servers. I've not had to deal with this even once.
Second, when you say you "heard others bring it up", my guess is these others are highly technical folks. Not a single "average" person stayed away from Mastodon due to this. I suspect perhaps 99% of active Mastodon users are not even aware of this.
These are valid criticisms of Mastodon. But they're not the reason people didn't sign up for it. Name recognition is.
> You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
FYI, for quite a while now you can switch servers, and have the followers automatically follow your new account.
I mean, isnt the default server on ATP also managed by a corpo? So what if they change the rule? they dont even have option to migrate account
Level of de-centralization Bluesky has is somewhere between the old Twitter and Ethereum, neither of which have strong resistance against central decision making.
The problem discussed here is that Mastodon is not simply de-centralized, but its superstructure upholds a segregation policy and loves to ostracize admins based on, ahem, preferences. This in turn encourage admins to join a virtue signaling zeitgeist, and towards assuming more divisive and dismissive stances, out of fear. As a second order effect, regular non-admin users and their ability to communicate would be not only at whim of the server owner but also that of the inner group cast towards the admin.
Bluesky doesn't have this type of problem, precisely because it's not too decentralized. Either you individually get banned or not, based on levels of value alignment between you and the corpo outsourced moderators. There are also blocklist feature as well as third party voluntarily applicable moderation framework in Bluesky, but personally I can't imagine majority of users using it, or dividing the network into fragmented subgroups, and are non-factors in the grand scheme of things.
(By the way, I sometimes wonder how moderator value alignment is going to inevitably drift over time; as I understand it, social media content moderation is partially automated and exploitatively outsourced to workers from low income regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon is almost exclusively discussed in context of human rights and fair worker treatment, but I think this also means a lot of people with minimal prior exposure to media, let alone the anaerobic layer of the Internet, are being trained to develop preferences on such content and especially the more flaggable yet less hateful and flaggable-but-less-flag-deserving content. i.e. stimulative but not blood and gore. If anyone is reading down to this line, you know what I mean.)
Subscribing to a labeller is as easy as following any other account. I use several 3rd party moderation services. The bar to adoption is much lower than I think you anticipate
Bluesky has an initial PDS anyone can run, available on their github. Last I checked they said not to host more than 10 accounts during the beta testing. You can absolutely migrate your account and still use the Bluesky app. The custom server is an option at login
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
> I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
¹ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-...
No mention of their benefit corporation status
> In terms of content moderation, posts related to child sexual abuse or terrorism are best handled by professionals trained to help keep millions or billions safe.
Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?
https://archive.ph/VDPuq
They're right that they need to actually shift the power away from Bluesky and have users use other servers.
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
I have been saying the same things for over a decade, and writing about it. But more importantly - I built the alternative, we’ve tested it with lots of local communities and will be going to market Nov 5th this year
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
wants to create a nonprofit foundation to govern and protect the AT Protocol, outside of Bluesky the company
Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can’t rely on them.
What’s the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking away. Just do it.
0. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
I can already tell that whilst reactionary propaganda will now be allowed on the platform, any anti-genocide activism will be quietly censored. It's like I can already taste it.