Bluesky Launches RSS Feeds (openrss.org) 36
Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has released its new RSS feeds. openrss.org reports: The link to a user's RSS feed is quite lengthy, making it not so easy to remember, and you can't really tell which user's profile an RSS feed is for just by looking at it. Here's the RSS feed link for Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber, for example: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oky5czdrnfjpqslsw2a5iclo/rss. But thankfully, this doesn't matter much, because they're embedded on each user's profile on the Bluesky website. This makes each user's RSS feed automatically discoverable by any RSS reader app. You can simply copy and paste the link to a user's profile into the app, and it will find the user's RSS feed for you automatically.
Some RSS apps will even allow you to get a Bluesky user's RSS feed simply by typing their username in the search. This setup also works well with RSS browser extensions. So if you're using one with RSS detection, it will automatically detect a user's RSS feed after visiting their Bluesky profile in your browser.
Some RSS apps will even allow you to get a Bluesky user's RSS feed simply by typing their username in the search. This setup also works well with RSS browser extensions. So if you're using one with RSS detection, it will automatically detect a user's RSS feed after visiting their Bluesky profile in your browser.
Everything in BSky is based on DIDs. (Score:3, Informative)
But they _DO_ have a redirect to your usual profile URL (which is the one you choose and can be a custom domain and very memorable) if you just slap /rss on the end of it, to get to your actual RSS URL. So it's as trivial to get someones RSS URL as it could possibly be.
Re:Everything in BSky is based on DIDs. (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, it's kind of hard to have a good distributed social media system without DIDs. Look at Mastodon, for example. They rely just on username@hostname. But that means that the user is indelibly tied to (A) a specific username, and (B) a specific host. And it's (B) that's particularly problematic, because hosts can just spontaneously disappear, or the server admin can have a grudge against you and delete (or even modify!!) all your data, or do basically whatever they want because each one is basically a lord of his own personal fiefdom (few people have any clue what they're getting into when they pick a server). And then you're just gone. In Bluesky, your data is all tied to a DID and signed, so you can theoretically just restore a backup literally anywhere; name changes and server changes mean nothing, it's the DID that is "you".
I hear Mastodon (ActivityPub) people a lot (I'm on both networks) writing things like:
"Meh, Bluesky can't be a legit attempt at distributed social media, if they wanted to be legit, they'd just have adopted ActivityPub - and if they have issues with ActivityPub's design, and sure, we openly admit there are a lot, they should have just improved it! It must be a conspiracy from Jack Dorsey".
Well, that is what they are doing, improving on the design flaws of ActivityPub - but you can't do that within ActivityPub, because the problems lie at the core of how ActivityPub works. One can create a bridge to ActivityPub, and it shouldn't even be that hard, but you can't fix ActivityPub and still be natively compatible with it. It's like saying:
"Meh, electric lamps can't be a legitimate attempt at lighting, if they wanted to be legit, they'd just have adopted kerosene lamps and the kerosene distribution system and then used electricity to improve on it instead of trying to replace it all!"
'Cause, you know, you should just run the electricity down the kerosene, and you should use the wick as your glow element, and, and....
When Twitter was considering creating a distributed social media ecosystem, they DID consider ActivityPub, and rejected the design as too flawed, which is why Jay's proposal for ATProto was accepted instead. And to correct the common misconception: Jack did not create ATProto/Bluesky - Jay and her team did. Jack does not own Bluesky - he has a single-digit stake. He does not run Bluesky - he has a single board seat, and is the "odd man out". He's not even on Bluesky anymore - he prefers Nostr, where all the other crypto bros hang out, and most of the Bluesky community doesn't like him.
Re: Everything in BSky is based on DIDs. (Score:1)
This new Bluesky protocol is neither complete nor fully published. Things like account migration havenâ(TM)t even been worked out and features added to the Bluesky platform arenâ(TM)t standardized. The claim that it will be decentralized and open source is just a red herring, it will run into the same issues as Mastodon did, where servers remain centralized, interoperability and censorship rules are decided by the original project and portability either doesnâ(TM)t exist or is technically pos
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Everything aspect gets published as soon as it's relatively stable. I mean... what do you want, features to be published while they're still WIPs? And nobody is claiming that the project is fully complete. But the entire architecture is demonstrably designed around decentralization in a way that would fix Mastodon's problems, and they're demonstrably making continuous progress. This should be celebrated, not damned.
Mastodon is a giant stac
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First of all, as I said before, none of this has been written down in a protocol yet. You should definitely write a protocol before you release a client/service because obviously you know how to do these things in a client/server, then you have a protocol, just not published.
They don't know how to fulfill that promise, because effectively it is impossible to have centralized servers and decentralized censorship (call it moderation, whatever you want), because someone, somewhere will have some content someon
Mastodon (and the Fediverse) vs. BlueSky (Score:2)
I hear Mastodon (ActivityPub) people a lot (I'm on both networks) writing things like:
You might hear the sentence you wrote somewhere, but the most common gripe with BlueSky is:
- The whole ActivityPub-powered Fediverse, including tons of Mastodon instances are all already federated as of today. Yes, there are some inconvenience (e.g.: the manual steps necessary whenever you change a nickname and/or server as you mention (*), or merely the fact that you have to pick up one server among many, each with their own moderation policies) but they aren't any different than the one, e.g., with e-mai
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This is just nonsense
First off, literally nothing about the underlying protocol makes sense without it being 100% designed for federation, with far more care put into design for practicalities than with ActivityPub. Seriously, just look at the API [atproto.blue] and explain how any of it makes sense without it being for federation.
Secondly, it's false. They now run two instances interna
Where is the BlueSky federation _TODAY_ ? (Score:2)
As the french saying goes:
"Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l'auras"
(or as the english equivalent: ": a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush")
Secondly, it's false. They now run two instances internally and {Paraphrased as: Blah, blah, blah, ...}
Okay, can you point me to a dozen of 3rd party, independently-run instances of BlueSky?
No, you can't.
Until that actually happens in practice, BlueSky is only theoretically promised to be distributable.
Meanwhile Mastodon, despite all the warts you find in its protocol is.
ActivityPub is a garbage protocol. It just wasn't thought through well.
Nobody says its perfect.
It's just that it's already working out in the wild.
Pick an area of focus for your demands, for God's sake.
My demands are simp
Clean (Score:2)
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Lack of advertising is a problem, moderation ain't free and there's no real incentive to run nodes.
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You can create nodes that are ad supported. You can create nodes that are user-supported. You can create nodes that are owner-supported. Etc. Mastodon, despite its clunky underlying design, has shown that these things are eminently fundable.
The main difference is that migration is easier and more thorough in ATProto.
That said, re: scaling moderation: I do think we're increasingly going to see the "first layer" of moderation be AI, and only appeals be handled by actual humans. AI sentiment analysis is on
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I think if it's actually about building online communities, content moderation won't be an issue; There's usually someone willing to put in the time & effort, at least for a while. If a community loses its momentum, then let it go. I do think there should be stats immediately apparent as to how many members are in a group & how active it is.
Then there's dealing with bots & sock-puppets. I think tha
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Locally-run AIs are dirt cheap. Funding is not an issue.
I don't know where this idea that AIs are inherently expensive to run comes from. Anything trained using TinyLLaMA as a base for example can generate *thousands* of tokens per second on a modern consumer-grade GPU. Even something heavier like Falcon-40B will generate a couple dozen per second. Mixtral performs even better, both in terms of speed and quality. Etc.
Do the math, amortizing the cost of such a consumer system over a couple years of lifes
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Browse Huggingface [huggingface.co]. At the time of writing, there's nearly half a million models on it. Virtually nobody is getting paid for any of that. This is the open-source community in action. Finetuning AIs is not inaccessible - you just have to care enough to learn how to do it. And lots of people (myself included) do.
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(Note that the majority of those half-million models are garbage, but that's beside the point - there's a LOT of development going on, and even the 10%-ish that are good and 1% that are great is still a LOT of models).
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> I don't know where this idea that AIs are inherently expensive to run comes from
Training can be really expensive, especially if ypu're renting A100's.
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We're not talking about foundational models, just finetunes, even LoRAs. And sentiment analysis is a quite simple task for LLMs; it doesn't take heavyweight models.
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One of the nice features of Bluesky (and it boggles the mind is why more social media sites don't do this) is custom algorithms ("feeds"). Anyone can make one, anyone can use them; you pick your own algo. And then you very quickly find users who have interests that match yours via them. Of course, like anywhere (online or off), the best way to make friends / earn follows is... to interact with other people, replying to their posts, etc, rather than just posting into the void and hoping someone stumbles i
Nobody even needs Twitter, nor a clone (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, another completely useless site and feature that only the advertisement industry ehh I mean influencers care about.
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I read slashdot on RSS Live Bookmarks every day (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I am in the minority here, but RSS needs a resurgence and I hope it never dies. We need a universal standard for seeing new content from multiple sources. I follow about 200 websites, many of which only publish new content maybe once a month. It would be nice to instantly see every new release, like I am doing with Livemarks.
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It would take me 5x as long to read morning news with Brave as it does with Akregator.
Why waste that time?
It bears mentioning (Score:3)
Ya know, "backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey" isn't the compliment or the trust builder someone thinks it is. Perhaps they should stop mentioning that part if they want users to adopt it because it sounds like "we'll sell your commoditized user *ss up the river AGAIN, just like we did with Twitter". I'll stick with The Fediverse, thanks.
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It's also a distortion. Dorsey actually hates Bluesky because the people there mostly don't like him. Jay proposed, led, and continues to lead Bluesky, and she owns a majority stake as well. Dorsey owns a single-digit stake, has one board seat (which he's the odd-man-out on), and no longer posts on Bluesky, preferring Nostr (with the other crypto bros) instead.
The TL/DR is that Twitter put out a RFP, Jay's proposal won, Twitter invested and got a stake, but Jay retained control.
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Also, I don't know who you think "they" is. In this context, "they" is whoever wrote this article. It's certainly not anyone from Bluesky pushing the Dorsey connection.
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> just like we did with Twitter". I'll stick with The Fediverse, thanks.
It's funny because the Dorsey Twitter was full of hundreds of Feds.
He says he was fooled, or stoned, or fasting in Africa or something.
But he seems to be minor in Bluesky.
Whhoooosh (Score:2)
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What personality? ***Dorsey Isn't Even On Bluesky***. He didn't make it. He doesn't own it. He doesn't like it, because the people there don't like him. It's so damned annoying that people keep trying to write Jay out of the picture of her own distributed social media network and replace her with Jack because he's more famous.
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People who write this sort of thing are morons who thinks that Jack made Bluesky and/or owns Bluesky and/or runs Bluesky and/or is even active on Bluesky at all.
It's Jay. JAY GRABER is the person you're thinking of. Not Jack Dorsey.
Only news because its bad (Score:2)
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It sure would be nice if Masto people would actually take more than five seconds to learn about Bluesky before writing about it.
A [slashdot.org]
B [slashdot.org]
(Note: I'm on both Mastodon and Bluesky. But I much prefer the latter, both architecturally and from a user experience standpoint. At this point, I'm only on Mastodon because some of my friends are there)