There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a

The most vocal and obnoxious of the Bluesky userbase get antagonized by pretty much anything. Pleasing that lot is a fruitless task.

What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.

Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.

> user-antagonistic communication

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.

I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:

> i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.

That was in semi private. I'd de-enohazize the expense part seirously, I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:

> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

But that is also not owning it either, and I think this is an ownable lesson in just being human too, in deciding whether online mediums are corporate, lawyer, marketing, and engineer checked reviewed approved and wise correct words, or whether there must be some permission to be ourselves online, and some expectations that people are only human, and we should be thankful they are sharing their human experiences with us or not. It's not just having fun: whether we can be ourselves online is in question. Whether that is socially allowed.

(And generally I haven't found the character of the team to be deeply off. They haven't been, in my view, going out of their way to create injury, but they have been sharing sides that people have never wanted to hear!)

I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice. Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves.

And to creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal / compsable moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement!) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility. Which is a capability atproto is truly uniquely without compare set up to support & enable.

Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no. With the good willing souls, we work towards synthesis & understanding; hopefully all sides find that agreeable.

Yeah its the same plans Elon has for X

Both are good

What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.

We have never had an online open public space where each of us has our voice, can shape our experience, can use our own compsable moderation, can integrate with whatever apps we choose.

How, in spite of having no data on what it would be like, people are so confident that leaving shared open connected mediums behind is the only way to go is such a mystery to me.

The radio station I'm on just played a modem tone, Mountain Chill Radio. But I was already gearing up to write what an amazing era this has been, how incredible a rise it has been that we can connect & talk, with so many people. My dialtone travels so much further & that is glorious. I have no idea, feel like I would have no chance to build a good private network for myself, that my life would stagnante and closed, if I had to build my networks myself in private, smuggling the light of my soul to others rather than being able to let it out.

I am happy to be online. I am proud of my "data", my voice, my app records. There's some less pleasant less shiny corners! But it is mad incredible that I get to do this live, that I get to have so many edges of connection and serendipity. People provide the most wild interesting comments and suggestions and topics, ongoingly. I benefit so much from them sharing their lives.

I spiritually believe deeply that we have our light to share with the universe. To turn your nose up at sharing, to renounce & see only evil, to let the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, this spectre of the closed/bad/no-good controlling systems shape our thinking here is a pandora's box: I say you are shutting the door right as hope is finally trying to get out.

Who is this "we" and where can I read their opinions?

Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.

That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)

This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)

Fair enough, I've never been involved in a CEO recruitment, I can't imagine the candidate pool tends to include people like the previous CEO of Bluesky

There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back.

Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.

> Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

But at proto is equally open? You can also just save all of at proto.

I think it's important to remember that decentralization is a barrier to having control over your data. If you're going to participate in these systems, you should treat everything you do as permanent, because by design you will not be in control of where that data is stored.

"Don't use it if you don't like it" is not a sufficient response here, because the gathering and verifying of personal data is NOT PURELY AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM. You might post about me. Etc.

Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."

Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.

I'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope.

I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.

As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).

>You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

The entire point of a platform like Twitter / Bluesky is reach, not privacy.

Posts and discussions there are meant to be public, and highly visible.

It's not that people don't care. It's that this is not what the platform is for.

What's important for a platform like that is not even anonymity, but functional pseudonymity.

And that thing is on its way to the effectively outlawed with the push for "age verification".

People do notice it and leave [1], but at some point, there might be no place to go to.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodb...

If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

>If BlueSky could figure that out

It's a "people problem" not a technical one. For example if you are following anything from Asia, or just generally from Japan and Korea you will most likely see it on Twitter, there was never a big exodus of users there. Bsky has almost 0 engagement. Just watching WBC this week and I wanted to see korean highlights of their games. They are all over on Twitter, nothing on Bsky.

It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is.

I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...

Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.

https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a

"Mastodon already won, by being used by people" I'm sorry what

In what world did the Mastodon CEO made money out of Mastodon beside the small public salary he's been taking? You are making things up.

I won't doubt your statistics. In practice, my experience is that it really is distributed.

I just went to my feed (only people I follow), and although mastodon.social showed up a few times, the majority of users I interact with are on distinct servers. So out of 20 people, I see 17 different servers.

My feed will not be impacted much if mastodon.social dies.

Yeah, the value of money is ironically usually not what we mean with ”values”.

IANAL but no, executives are not actually legally required to increase shareholder value.

If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.

There is an actual difference

I'm not going to speak for OP, but I definitely remember it also being a rallying cry for Bluesky too. "No one person can control the network blah blah blah"

I mean, the competition isn't setting a high bar, between the guy complaining about 'white people not having a homeland' and the other guy peddling addictive stuff to teens and AI slop to their grandparents.

That said, I have genuinely been enjoying Blue Sky. It has 'enough' for me. There are a bunch of YIMBYs and urbanists. The mayor of my city and one of my city councilors are there. There is starting to be a bike racing community. There are some good local journalists.

I read your other comment; I hope your optimism is warranted.

no sir, never gonna do crypto social media

> PS: My role as interim CEO will be to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.

This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.

You are wrong about pretty much all of that, including your assumed reasoning for why this is happening. Jay chose to change her role so she could do deeper work on the technology. That's it.

What's fun about it?

Last activity 17 days ago, 23 days ago, 3 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago

"17 posts" since 2024.

13 of them are reposts, and 2 of them are his own actual posts and then made 2 more posts about becoming the interim CEO of Bluesky and then "thanking" Jay.

That doesn't seem like he even uses it regularly only up until the leadership changes.

… most social networks give you a “notification” if somebody follows you or engages with a post but there are two exceptions: (1) is LinkedIn which gives you a double-dose of main feed items you didn’t click on and that you never clicked on anything like ever so it’s a chance to prove their model is right… most social networks play a “ding” sound if somebody likes your post but LinkedIn dings when you post something because their standards are low. (2) Threads posts “notifications” that are somewhere between completely senseless and “political outrage of some kind but I can’t tell if they like Trump or hate Trump”