For the average twitter user this is probably the exact opposite of a compelling position. Tech people want more control and less abstraction. Everyone else is happy with their walled gardens and ten layers of separation from the machine code. Its why things are the way they are and not some technopunk utopia that we all want.

Over time, they shut down their APIs (or charged huge fees) in an effort to intentionally kill off third-party clients and services.

A key goal for Bluesky is to "lock open" the network and the API so that it's impossible to reverse the decision.

Imagine a sort of plug in ecosystem with sane defaults

I think you're under-estimating what's happening with 3rd-party feeds. That's a core pattern where independent services can integrate into the UX as if they're native to the product. This means turning the client into an open platform for third-party applications.

That's been a success with feeds. They're actively adopted and created by users. Most of the feeds are hosted by skyfeed, a 3P app which gives users a GUI to create them. The author of skyfeed submitted this actually. Talented dev afaict but I've not met them, which is kind of the point. (Looking forward to it though, redsolver!)

3P integration operates by a thick client model. We exchange typed JSON that describes content and interfaces. This lets services drive the client through request/response flows. We can bounce out to webviews when we need, but not executing code means better integration into the app, which means users get access to new experiences within the client and providers get users more easily. This being social protocol means that auth and high level verbs (following, liking, commenting) also come along. The Web 1.0 did quite a bit without client scripting, and I suspect this client can too.

I also want to mention: the product experience right now is establishing a UX on a protocol-driven network that feels good to consumers. Our metric for success wasn't whether it was novel; it was whether we could meet consumer expectations. If we can prove out scaling -- which I'm now confident we will -- then we've established the core of the network. After that we use that core as a backbone for 3P devs to build integrated experiences, and it should lead to a notably diverse product, and I think that's the compelling position for us to offer.

I do like the technical vision, a lot. But I haven't been able to try it out because any time I felt the desire to look, nobody could actually link me to a post or a feed. So I never achieved the required activation energy to even look at it, nevermind adding it to my doomscrolling repertoire or signing up to the thing.

Opening up the posts is a good first step to sustainable adoption. Now next time people are mad at Twitter they'll have an outlet instead of being met with a brick wall when they finally get the urge to try something new.

bsky-social-exnc4-5h2qb

bsky-social-cocv2-coy6u

bsky-social-txqzx-nqhw3

bsky-social-h6snn-255ig

bsky-social-yxngj-y5dad

bsky-social-fo32f-lz7p5

bsky-social-6txdl-ppkes

bsky-social-ihhnj-w4e24

bsky-social-3kidb-2tagv

bsky-social-llyit-xx3kt

bsky-social-eeqkk-tf6qh

bsky-social-qttr7-gjh3i

bsky-social-qttr7-gjh3i

bsky-social-5xbvh-kgbua

bsky-social-jaixd-xof3h

bsky-social-fzzhr-3ow5j

bsky-social-sns4s-wnuwh

bsky-social-pmqcb-izd6n

bsky-social-bmgi4-bhg5p

bsky-social-k2vcy-bbcwf

bsky-social-4z3ir-rndd7

bsky-social-ug2hp-de3br

EDIT: all have been claimed

bsky-social-te3n3-yx3ib

bsky-social-3rwal-hj636

bsky-social-mvjpq-mzusy

bsky-social-jtuoi-ktnlj

Being a small group of course made the transition easier. Most of us didn't use Twitter to follow all kinds of stuff, just mostly these things.

And while being a clique, with no outside influences, can be bad, the "influences" you now get from blue checks on X isn't anything worth having. Just abuse.

But that's also how I used Twitter. An account specifically for this. Only ever followed or interacted with content related to this. So not using it to consume other content, write about anything that comes to mind etc.

The big corporate accounts may have immediately fled for the safety and features of Threads, but I've noticed more and more journalists, radio personalities, columnists etc creating Bluesky accounts as they scale back on their Twitter use.

Seems like Bluesky is the grassroots favourite.

So this isn't the same situation again.

Compelling for whom? For developers? I’m not sure anyone else will care.

Most of the biggest complaints people have about twitter are client-side problems. So just having an ecosystem of clients (and the competitive pressure that puts on the official client) makes the experience way better

A bunch of algo and client options sound good for someone who is already a committed user, but for a new user it just complicated the onboarding experience.

Not to mention, it’s unclear what the incentive to put real resources behind any of these clients is.

This is in contrast to Mastodon where people were told to pick an instance and not really guided to any one as the primary one (because Mastodon devs/users don't want there to be a thought that there even is a "primary" instance).

People here on HN can claim picking an instance isn't a big deal all they want, but I can say with confidence it is. I'm in various furry artist Discord servers where people expressed their distaste for having to deal with the multiple instances.

Take that away you’re really back to “just Twitter” with fewer features and less content.

I agree that algo and client choice would be a positive for a mature site like Twitter, but it’s unclear how a site with this strategy will get enough traction for the choices to be useful

An idealistic, technical user might put up with the typical quality of early "alternative solution" apps, but seeing enough errors, crashes, unintuitive UX, and other hurdles, several times across several apps, will get most users to give up on the platform.

I don't know how you can expect people to make the move when they're not even able to sign in

For devs that want to experiment, we've had a special waitlist for a while: https://atproto.com/blog/call-for-developers

As an aside, do you have any plans to make your choices of domain names / branding less confusing / sketchy looking? (bsky.app, blueskyweb.xyz, bsky.social for user names, 'Bluesky Social' on the app store, etc)

The domain situation is unfortunate and confusing. We don't have any immediate solution but agree it's a problem.

You guys know that every single playform eventually go downhill in content quality as the user base grows, right? You are wasting your time. You'd better open up now or never. Nobody will bother looking at your product in a year if Threads gets bigger and better.

Obviously they need to drop the invite system at some point (and I am surprised it's been this long), but it's not the reason a given subcommunity didn't make the jump

bsky-social-hqjo5-ylied

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Now, what have we learned about building inside somebody else's proprietary castle and moat? How many times are we goung to play this game, without relying on actual open protocols?

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data.

Other smaller differences include: a different viewpoint about how schemas should be handled, a preference for domain usernames over AP’s double-@ email usernames, and the goal of having large scale search and discovery (rather than the hashtag style of discovery that ActivityPub favors).

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

I just know I've been burnt, as have many colleagues, on expanding companies stuff. And then them modifying/eliminating APIs.

It also is a PITA that "Open" is now a buzzword, rather than FLOSS. (For example, I'd call OpenAI anything but open.)

I wrote a comment last week diving more into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38660192

Mastodon puts too much onus on the user to pick a home server

Bluesky got it right by saying "we're going to be exactly familiar to people who like twitter, just open and better". The concepts are an almost exact drop-in replacement, for practical purposes, other than which one your friends are active on

I don't use it much right now because most of my people did switch back for now. But I check in periodically, and I'm rooting for it to succeed

So don't. There are multiple services you can pay a small fee to to host your own instance with only you on it.

I'm okay with consuming an upstream block/filter list, but I ultimately want executive control over it.

With your model that wouldn't be an issue.

Some instances and individuals will block Fediverse instances which federate with Bluesky.

That decision-making is quite widely distributed, with email service providers both making their own realtime or near-realtime determinations at both individual message and and network-provider levels (e.g., IP- or netblock-based quality determinations), as well as third-party quality measurements such as Spamhaus and Senderbase / Ironport (long since part of Cisco / Talos).

Increasingly even general Web traffic is subject to similar decisionmaking as with reCAPTCA, Cloudflare, and other services.

Individual decisionmaking simply does not scale to billions (or under IPv6, vastly more) relationships.

There's a give-and-take of blocking practices with Fediverse instances. I'm on a smaller instance maintained by someone I've known online for a decade or so, and who is highly principled in their decisions, though some do rub a bit raw on me. I've brought this up, and may yet decamp to another instance (or spin my own), though I'll also note that blocking fuckwits is a highly effective s/n preservation strategy. (The concept is highlighted in my Fediverse profile as a pinned post: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019>).

And I've been online for going on 40 years. Many of the naive presumptions of kumbaya and universal brotherhood have proved grossly misdirected. I'd once subscribed to many of them. I've grown up (or old).

Email spam is a problem because it directly attacks the utility and value of the communications channel, driving people to other alternatives (or none at all in some cases). Similar issues exist with telephony abuses (robocalls, scam calls, spoofing, privacy invasion and sruveillance, etc.).

In the case of group discussion / social / microblogging platforms, a key dynamic is the nazi bar problem (let one in and you're now running a nazi bar), and the race-to-the-bottom dynamic of various forms of harassment and intimidation: those voices which don't feel safe talking on a platform or channel won't talk on that channel. They're denied a platform, and the platform is denied their voice.

(The Fediverse is actually under fairly sustained criticism by those voices for not having sufficient tools, policies, and/or enforcement.)

For commercial, advertising-supported platforms, an additional consideration is advertisers' sensibilities, and the fact that high-value advertising, brand-safe content, and attractive advertising audiences are all factors which are dependent in large part on content moderation policies. This doesn't apply generally to the Fediverse (though individual ad-supported instances might appear within it, as with Threads). It does strongly apply to Twitter and Facebook's properties generally, however.

There's also the observation that clue flees stupidity and/or banality. The more a channel is taken over by any low-signal content (whether that's overtly abusive or not), the less that intelligent and substantive contributors will care to engage with that channel.

That again is a dynamic I've observed for many decades now online, and am coming to appreciate has a long prior offline history before that.

And also, again, these are all cases where systemic abuse requires systemic response. Your initial comment is not only naive but demonstrable infeasible. It's been tried, repeatedly, and it simply does not work.

The fact that we're having this discussion on a forum in which there are in fact system-level controls over what does and does not appear, and no individual user tools to accomplish same (bar hiding specific stories) somewhat underlines my point.

Why couldn't a protocol and reference implementation exist for a client migration if servers have similar schemas for users and posts?

Okay, but I never even signed up for Twitter.

Can it get worse? Right now I get ads every 3-4 tweets, and several of them are porn ads.

I also noticed ads that are not marked with the [Ad]-icon.

Can't see how it could get lower than this :(

Twitter was like that once. Just people flocking into the next walled garden...

Well that's just an opinion. I feel that it's better than it ever was. Sorry.