Literally my first thought seeing this headline was "oh my god who cares".

Bluesky is dead as a product.

and that the linked post is a lengthy apologia for the network having an incredibly obvious unremovable central point of control even as they pretend it doesn't.

Centralisation is a feature in social networks: being able to find your friends is the very first thing. But don't then pretend you aren't.

Every now and then I post to Bluesky asking: so what's the loadout for Bluesky? How many servers does it take to run this thing? What would it take to run my own?

These questions never quite seem to get answered or documented that I could find.

A "PDS" is a reasonable Ubuntu box. They seem unable to admit what it takes to run the rest, though.

Sorry, can you explain what unremovable central point of control you're referring to?

Looking at the federation architecture[0] shows that the network is inherently reliant on using a relay (or BGS - basically it's a giant data gathering server that generates the "external timeline" for applications using ATproto) - it's not possible for two PDSes to directly connect with one another (since a PDS does not store data from external users, but a relay does), which means that if a large relay falls apart, the entire part of that network goes down with it.

Similarly, if a relay decides to nullroute you, you are functionally up on shitcreek, which because it's all handled by the relay is way worse than getting a Mastodon instance filtered.

If we use a torrent analogy, it's not possible to use Bluesky/ATproto with DHT, you're required to connect to a tracker who then decides who you can peer with.

(Relatedly, AcitivityPub also supports the use of relays for discovery, but doesn't require them. It's just not often used because they tend to be a moderation firehose.)

[0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

Relays aren't hard-coded and PDSes are encouraged to connect to as many relays as they want. They are essentially network busses that help reduce the combinatorial explosion of connections between nodes. It is entirely possible for PDSes to connect directly to each other if they're so inclined.

It's still a notable bit of centralization present in the protocol - from the documentation presented, it's obvious that moreso than any other "node" in the software, if the relay breaks, that entire chunk of the network stops working. A PDS, a labeler or a feed generator vanishing means very little for the network on the whole, while the relay vanishing causes everything to fall apart.

Similarly, the fact Bluesky is offering a PDS implementation for self-hosting[0] but not a relay[1] tells me that hosting a relay is more than a non-trivial matter, although I'd love to be proven wrong there.

[0]: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

[1]: Well, outside of literally deploying Blueskys own implementation - https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/tree/main/cmd/bigsk... .

FYI the person you're replying to is the author of the post and a Bluesky dev

I just noticed that, thanks! Adjusted the tone a slight amount to be a bit more direct.

> nobody seems to be concerned in the slightest how to position Bluesky as an actual product

I thought it was already positioned as a Twitter competitor with the aim to make it harder to censor. Its aim is to replace Twitter.

Harder to censor isn't exactly the goal. Harder to capture is. The point is to make social media providers replaceable so that users are able to express a choice. We do this already with the feed algorithms, which are predominantly third-party services within the community. As the rest of the protocol wraps, hosting and application services will be able to do the same.

> The point is to make social media providers replaceable

And how is that a sustainable business?

Not paying close attention but I thought the problem being fixed was that twitter was a business and blustery is designed as a protocol.

The same way that any healthy market with competition is. The companies providing good services are sustainable, while those unable or unwilling to compete aren't.

Any healthy market with competition builds a wall of vendor lock-in. The aim is always easy to adopt hard to walk away from.

"How could a business succeed without trapping its customers?"

Isn't it run by the same people who were famous for censoring twitter?

Who?

Jack Dorsey.

To the best of my knowledge, and further evidenced from some of Elon's leaked texts from last year, Jack Dorsey has always been an adamant defender of free speech. Advertisers and the government were probably the two largest forces driving censorship at the company.

I think that's right. He did appoint people who were definitely very comfortable censoring things, but he might've not been aware. When I've seen him in interviews, he doesn't seem especially aware in general!

Jack Dorsey. Isn't that when they were censoring news stories?

Jack Dorsey started BlueSky / the AT protocol, but has left to greener pastures: Nostr

Oh, I did not know.

> Twitter competitor with the aim to make it harder to censor

This problem has already been solved by Telegram.

You will never get censorship-free anything if there's money to be made by making it not so. Bluesky, Nostr, all these non-Twitter Twitters will also cater to advertiser needs as soon as VC money enters the picture.

> slightest how to position Bluesky as an actual product in the current market

they kinda already did

through the initial media coverage and the people involved a lot of current still-somewhat X/Twitter user think of it as Twitter 2.0 and plan to go there ones it's more finalized/ready

mainly as far as I can tell there are a lot of people stuck on Twitter which do not like it anymore for various reasons but need something with decent discoverability which mastodon seems to not have so well

so if they manage to deliver in that area I would think they have a "not so small" user base already secured

but we will see

Maybe in June that was true, once Threads came out and got way more users and became a thing people think of as Twitter 2.0 I’d argue their position became much less secure. Nobody is waiting when Threads already exists.

I'd argue nobody is waiting at all. A tiny fraction of users split off to tiny communities on Mastodon with next to no traffic (probably exact what they wanted, to be fair), Threads would be dying if it wasn't propped up by Instagram, and everyone else remained happily on Twitter.

Or do we have a good reason to believe the active user counts posted by Elon and others are fake?

not fakes (through I don't trust Musk to be non-deceptive)

but there is a huge difference between "active user who wants to use it" and "active user who wants to not use it but due to network effects can't"

It's kinda a similar situation like with Facebook (and just Facebook, not Meta in general).

- they have some loyal groups (e.g. Facebook people broadly around 60 and older)

- they lost any interest (and much goodwill) from many other groups

- but due the various network effects many of the "lost interest" people still have it and might still count as active users depending on definition of active (but in practice they are passive not active users, unwilling to spend money on it, unwilling to give it any information about themself and not necessary the best ad targets either as there is a risk of you company being associated with "that annoying thing they would which to just discard".

Just with the difference that with Twitter most of the "passive" users are still active because they haven't found an alternative to be active on YET

Yeah but isn't threads basically dead now?

I think the core issue is that despite how stupid and shitty it's become and seems intent on continuing to become, Twitter is still Twitter and Twitter users don't want BlueSky or Threads, they want Twitter which is still Twitter despite Elon and co's best efforts.

Also the ability for users to fact-check ads is still hilarious and entertaining which almost offsets the amount of ads.

I'd argue Twitter is dying - DAU is dropping from its peak due to it's increasingly toxic environment and CEO who pushes conspiracy theories and extreme viewpoints and crucially, advertisers are leaving Twitter

I agree it seems to be dying monetary wise, the way Musk bought it put too much of a profit burden on a company which already had issues with profitability.

It also seem to be dying user wise outside of some communities, but I think it's will be like the death of Facebook. Slow, and due to network effects never complete. Through it has much less network effects then Facebook had (no family main communication, old now distant friend main communication etc.).

idk. at least in my cycle no one uses Threads or cares about it, including the people I referred to which hope for a Twitter 2.0 somewhere

it doesn't help that Threads through their action already kinda made it clear that their compatibility with mastodon and co. falls in the "embrace extend extinguish" category

and just by the fact that Threads is from Meta it can't be Twitter 2.0, to many people refuse to use meta products of any kind as much as possible as they fundamentally do not trust Meta at all

I don't use Facebook nor Threads so maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't Facebook Wall equivalent to Twitter timeline in the first place?

I submit it’s under-noted: many people want very different venues for generating an audience than for consuming information/content, a phenomena that’s gone some kind of parabolic since there started being serious money in being an influencer.

You see this in the way high-ish follower count folks are constantly pruning their follows to signal some kind of ratio. I guess that signal produces some outcome.

HN’s staying power as just about the best forum of remotely general interest might have a lot to do with there not being followers (along with a crack team of elite mods and other things). You can rack up karma but it’s a side quest, join date matters a bit on a boundary condition, but mostly there’s not really any raw fame factor outside a few hyper-famous folks.

I wonder if there’s any scalability past HN size on that.

Code it and they will come!

But you're right however this is HN not WSJ.

> I just love how Bluesky devs get hung up on technical details like this and nobody seems to be concerned in the slightest how to position Bluesky as an actual product in the current market

Well, this is a positioning of Bluesky in the market: they position Bluesky as an attractive product for users who are interested and knowledgable about technological topics. I guess if they have an initial user base of this group, and this group loves the product, they will take the next step and analyze how to grow from this to a larger group of (potential) users.

It's actually even less successful if that's the metric. The people who care about how it works are mostly on Masto. BlueSky has a dedicated user base, but it's not among protocol nerds.

> It's actually even less successful if that's the metric.

BlueSky was founded October 2021, while Mastadon exists since 2016. The latter thus had lot more time to get traction. :-)

idk, I find the protocol itself to be the most interesting aspect of BlueSky, it seems to be better designed than ActivityPub at this point.

I tried Bluesky for a few days though, and I was unable to find any technological content on the site. Literally 90% of what I could find was furry porn and rage-bait. If that's their goal, they've failed and need to start over.

>Literally 90% of what I could find was furry porn and rage-bait.

I feel like this is a recognizable genre of comment. I consider myself a big time Mastodon supporter and am proud to be an evangelist for it. One thing you would see in HN comment threads were these first time users claiming all the content was X where X was something very unusual, extreme, and the claims regarding what that extreme thing was would be completely all over the map. They would also be subjective, hard to prove or disprove, but also way out of line with my personal experience and the experience of others who had used Mastodon for anything beyond a trial period.

It looks like we're getting the same version of this type of comment now, except it's for Blue Sky. I've used the app on my phone and computer, followed a few people, followed a handful of discovery feeds. I can't really prove anything here, but I think whether it's Mastodon, whether it's Blue Sky, whether it's Lemmy, I feel like the most outrageous and unreliable comments have tended to be the genre of "skeptical new user sharing their first impression" style comments, which make broad brush claims as to what "most" of the content is on a given platform.

I'm not even a fan of Blue Sky for numerous reasons I won't get into here, but I've had an account for, perhaps a few months now, but, as I often find myself saying when it comes to new platforms, it is not at all my experience that I'm seeing furry porn and rage bait. If there's any one thing noticeably unique in my experience so far, it's the general lowered temperature you feel in your feed compared to Twitter.

I think that's because it's a hard to grow a new community. I don't think that makes it invalid. The primary reason people look for a new platform seems to be because their behavior wasn't accepted on more mainstream platforms.

Lemmy has some content problems, but I haven't ever noticed it nearly as bad. Mastodon is somewhere in between, but at least there's some good stuff there. Threads is definitely the chillest microblog platform but feels a bit too artificial at times. I would personally take Twitter, even at its current state, over Blue Sky all day long.

From what I can tell Bluesky doesn't have an algorithm. It just seems to show you the posts/reposts from the people you follow in chronological order.

A big selling point of Bluesky is algorithmic choice. There are three default feeds, one is "following" which is exactly what you said. If you swipe to the right you get "Discover" which is a lot like the "For You" Twitter feed. Finally there is "Popular With Friends" which is what it says on the tin.

If you don't like those, anyone can develop a feed algorithm and anyone can subscribe to it, so you can have topic based feeds like "Science" or you can have feeds that just change the way the feed behaves like "OnlyPosts", which is the following feed but with no reposts or replies.

so... what exactly IS Bluesky good at then?

It's good at showing you the posts from the people you follow. The quality of your feed is entirely up to you.

That's exactly what Twitter does. Why is this a differentiating feature?

Fewer Nazis in your replies is the big one.

Has this changed recently? When I was on Twitter a few years ago I often missed posts from my friends because the algorithm didn't show them to me. Same when I posted, often my friends didn't see it.

I don't follow anyone though. I don't know anyone using Bluesky, and I have been unable to find anyone worth following in any feed.

NSFW content is disabled by default and you can't ever see it unless you go out of your way to enable it.

I don't understand why it has to be a "product" with a "market". Mastodon (and old-school forums) have shown that as long as you can cover the hosting costs of an instance, you can have social media without the bad incentives that giant centralized networks have.

The lesson of the past 15 years is that creating a "global town hall" with hundreds of millions of daily users doesn't guarantee profitability. So why not decentralize and try to go small and local, like the phpBB forums that are still chugging along?