Bluesky Blog

In a similar vain, I'm curious how Bluesky[0] will pan out. The protocol looks very cool with how much it separates and distributes the different concerns[1] (storage, recommendations, clients, etc.) as opposed to something "federated but fairly monolithic" like Mastodon. [0]: https://blueskyweb.xyz/ [1]: https://atproto.com/docs

Here's how I think about it: * ActivityPub -> AT Protocol (https://atproto.com/) * Mastadon -> Bluesky (https://blueskyweb.xyz/) Right now, federation is not turned on for the Bluesky instance. There are differences in both, however. I'm not going to speak about my impressions of the Mastadon vs Bluesky teams because frankly, Mastadon never really caught on with me, so they're probably biased. At the protocol level, I haven't implemented ActivityPub in a decade, so I'm a bit behind developments there personally, but the mental model for AT Protocol is best analogized as git, honestly. Users have a PDS, a personal data server, that is identified by a domain, and signed. The location of the PDS does not have to match the domain, enabling you to do what you see here: a user with a domain as their handle, yet all the PDS data is stored on bluesky's servers. You can make a backup of your data at any time, and move your PDS somewhere else with ease (again, once federation is actually implemented, the path there is straightforward though). This is analogous to how you have a git repository locally, and on GitHub, and you point people at the GitHub, but say you decide you hate GitHub, and move to GitLab: you just upload your git repo there, and you're good. Same thing, except since identity is on your own domain, you don't even need to do a redirect, everything Just Works. This analogy is also fruitful for understanding current limitations: "delete a post" is kind of like "git…

Raise your glasses if you wish Elon Musk's Twitter do die out. P.s. I can't wait for Blue Sky to be released https://blueskyweb.xyz/. That'd be the point in time when Twitter's death is quickly accelerated.

How does this compare with Bluesky, which I understand also uses DIDs? https://blueskyweb.org/

If you’re not aware, that’s basically exactly what Jack (and team) are currently working on [0][1]. 1. https://blueskyweb.org/ 2. https://atproto.com/

Mastodon is a Confederation as no central authority moderates all instances. https://blueskyweb.xyz Actually is Federated.

The fact that one has to pick from many different places to set up an account is a massive barrier to entry. Let alone the complexity of moving an account from one host to another is also woefully complex, so if you choose wrong, you’re in for more pain. I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://blueskyweb.org/

I'm curious to see what the adoption of BlueSky will be if ever available https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog I don't understand why it's so hard for everyone to just have their own blog that is twitter-sized posts and you follow the people you want or don't. No need for censorship or filtering because you simply don't follow people you find offensive? No need for ads because it's your own app/data. The problem is there needs to be an edge cache of each post and storage/bandwidth isn't "free" (just cheap these days). The app/data is either entirely on your phone or browser. I guess the thing about twitter/facebook is people want "discovery" and to profit off it by self-promotion. So it's like those drones in the sky no-one asked for, it's someone being obnoxious for attention and profit. Just like usenet had its first spam sooner or later.

There's the nostr protocol that could be a good censorship resistant decentralised alternative [1] Jack Dorsey (ex-Twitter CEO) is also working on a protocol with similar properties [2] Neither can really replace Twitter right now, but they're interesting alternatives coming down the pipeline. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr [2] https://blueskyweb.org/

Created my Twitter account in 2007; one of the first 700,000 accounts on the service. I’m not jumping ship; I’m taking a wait and see attitude. I did signup for Jack Dorsey’s new social network: https://blueskyweb.xyz I’ve had Mastodon account for while but I’ve haven’t used it much, but that may change…

https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#matrix-in-the-new… > our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol Sounds like some there are some parallels, and the protocol might inspire portable account identities in Matrix! The only account migration tool I know of at the moment is proprietary [1], I'd love to see portable identity in Matrix come to life. [1]: https://ems.element.io/tools/matrix-migration

a lot more info about what this is can be found here https://blueskyweb.org

Bluesky | Mobile Engineer | Remote, PST preferred | https://twitter.com/bluesky Bluesky is building a new protocol for social networking. We're solving decentralized identity, reputation, and moderation, as well as laying the groundwork for an Internet of self-authenticating data. We're looking for React Native engineers with experience and a passion for building great software. More details on our site: https://blueskyweb.org/join/software-engineer-mobile To apply, email [email protected] with your resume and cover letter.

He did made a research team at Twitter for distributed protocols, "Project Bluesky". Looks like it spinned of Twitter as a Public Benefit LLC in the early months of 2022. https://blueskyweb.xyz

Maybe this was the underlying goal in their efforts with Bluesky?[1] 1. https://blueskyweb.org

Good point. Even if there were some sort of open source spec like the W3C specs, for instance, Twitter would still be a black box that could choose to conform to the spec or not choose to. What we need is something more enforceable. So either you do something completely green field like https://blueskyweb.xyz/, or you spend $43B & roll up your sleeves to try and fix the problems with the current platform.

I was just interested in learning about a micro blogging project from Twitter and their blog is basically empty, but the discord has a lot of activity. It's a bit jarring to see these professionals interacting on a gaming platform, and adds a lot of friction for me personally. I'm really interested in the technology and updates but not enough to sift through their chitchatting. No offense. https://blueskyweb.org/ https://discord.gg/YmrHBhCuFa

I really wonder how Bluesky [1] (Twitter's project of project to build a decentralized social media protocol) will take ActivityPub and especially Mastodon into account… Both the W3C and RetroShare have reacted to the news on Twitter [2] but are totally ignored so far. [1] https://blueskyweb.org/ [2] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106

I have my foot in both the ActivityPub and atproto camps as nothing more than an interested observer/developer, but I want to defend Bluesky a bit here. What Bluesky are really building is atproto. If bsky.app and atproto were in a house fire and the team could only rescue one, they'd rescue atproto. Throughout this year there was such demand for a Twitter alternative that wasn't Mastodon, people jumped aboard bsky.app despite it only being a testbed/PoC for the development of atproto. The Bluesky team reviewed the existing protocols for distributed public conversation and none of them checked all the boxes. So they built their own. Their goals were [1]: - Account portability. Being able move your entire social graph (identity, posts, follows, likes, etc) without the previous server needing to cooperate or even be online [2]. - Scale. A "big-world" view of the entire network to enable global conversation. - Trust. Letting users build custom feeds so you can control what your timeline looks like and being open by default. One complaint against atproto is: why not work instead to improve ActivityPub? As someone who has worked with both protocols, I agree with the Bluesky team that it would have been too difficult to retrofit these features into ActivityPub (portability and scale, especially). Plus, a lot of Mastodon power users have philosophical disagreements with the things required for "big-world" global conversation so it's unlikely Bluesky would have received a warm…

You're gonna have to start citing something from folks joining bluesky saying that that's what they want, because inside the platform, no one is echoing that sentiment, nor does either bluesky or AT protocol websites suggest an approach where people are being blocked in that manner. bluesky/AT protocol is pretty clear how they see moderation to work. > Our approach to moderation is three-fold: automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling > Labels can be automatically or manually generated, and can be applied by any service or person in the network > For example, an organization like the ACLU could create a “hate-speech” label, and services or users in the network could subscribe to their labels to flag, filter, mute, or ban content. The Bluesky reference app we’re building has custom controls that lets users hide, warn, or show content, and will add more controls over time. Through this approach, we aim to prioritize user safety while giving people more control and transparency over how moderation is done https://blueskyweb.xyz/faq Plus https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation If people, after reading that (or ignoring that) still end up bluesky, we can kind of assume that they agree (explicitly or implicitly) with the approach.

https://bsky.app/ https://blueskyweb.xyz/

Sure, I'll try to explain the Gmail point: - Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step. The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by: - regulating Google to let you access your data irrespectively if you are banned from their frontend or not. You can choose to export it in a standardized way to your own server, IPFS or another cloud provider. All data and metadata is exported and then parsed depending on capabilities of the receiving server. - putting all of your data, encrypted, on IPFS or similar and creating multiple frontends for it (not unlike email clients, right? Similar idea). Then assigning your unique DID to this data, so it's part of your online belongings - Next step would be regulating Google to allow you to use the complete user data stored on their servers with any client. Like an S3 bucket? Yes, something like that. Google can choose to charge some price for the access, that's OK. GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough Edit: Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses. You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overview On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more…

I should have submitted https://blueskyweb.org instead.

The “Personal” in PDS doesn’t mean it is only for self-hosting. Bluesky has a main PDS instance at https://bsky.social that serves almost all of the Bluesky user base. There is a good overview of the architecture here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture Here’s a snippet from the protocol roadmap they published 3-4 weeks ago [1]: Multiple PDS instances The Bluesky PDS (bsky.social) is currently a monolithic PostgreSQL database with over a million hosted repositories. We will be splitting accounts across multiple instances, using the protocol itself to help with scaling. [1] https://atproto.com/blog/2023-protocol-roadmap

Bluesky Social PBC | Backend Developer | Remote US | Full Time Bluesky's mission is to transition the social web from platforms to protocols. As a backend dev, you'll be writing protocol and backend code that will be a critical part of transforming social media. Responsibilities: • Scale our existing services to millions of users • Develop and maintain the TypeScript AT Protocol implementation • Create SDK and API tools for an ecosystem of protocol developers For more information and to apply: https://blueskyweb.xyz/join/ts-developer

Bluesky Social PBC | TypeScript Developer | Remote US | Full Time Bluesky’s mission is to transition the social web from platforms to protocols. As a TypeScript dev, you’ll be writing protocol and backend code that will be a critical part of transforming social media. Responsibilities: + Develop and maintain the TypeScript AT Protocol implementation + Scale our existing services to millions of users + Create SDK and API tools for an ecosystem of protocol developers For more information and to apply: https://blueskyweb.xyz/join/ts-developer

Sure, but that is a lofty goal, and quite different from Bluesky's goals, which (according to https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/6-13-2023-what-is-bluesky) are: - Users own their data and can take it anywhere they want to go. - Developers will never get locked out of the ecosystems they help build. - Creators will always own their relationships with their audience. User portability is always possible without the user owning their domain. I suppose the creator relationships are maybe relevant to this domain stuff?

See here: https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

> They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it. I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

You’re right that governance structure matters. However, people speculating about ownership instead of researching it doesn’t help much. Each organization is different and analogies aren’t facts. Looks like Dorsey had a seat on the board as of 2022. I don’t know if there’s a good way to find out if that changed? The closest thing there is to an official web page is the FAQ and blog articles that it links to. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/2-7-2022-overview