Bluesky Opens To the Public (techcrunch.com) 62
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk's X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads' 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon's 1.8 million?
Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky's code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.
"What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you're not bottlenecking change on one organization," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. "The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product." This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there's not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.
Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky's code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.
"What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you're not bottlenecking change on one organization," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. "The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product." This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there's not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.
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Re: Dempsey....no thanks... (Score:1, Informative)
Heâ(TM)s not in charge, Einstein.
This is Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:This is Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Some details on the protocol would be nice.
https://atproto.com/ [atproto.com]
Re:This is Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it resolve where your data is using DNS?
It uses IPFS. Somehow. I don't really understand, just that it stores your "ID" via some Web 3 stuff but other than that is a traditional client/server model where everything is on Bluesky's servers. The "federated" part is mostly theoretical at this point as they haven't opened to federation yet.
If a quasi-open source federated microblogging platform sounds familiar - you're right, this is just Mastodon with some Web 3 glued to it. Previously the only thing that made it "special" was the invite requirement meaning most people can't use it.
With that dropped, there's now no reason to use it. It's just Mastodon with the same problems Mastodon has, but, you know, originally created by Twitter devs. And with some Web 3 stuff bolted on to try and pretend it's "distributed." It's incredibly unclear what tying your "ID" to "Web 3" provides and why it's any better than ActivityPub.
Ironically, the only way to really see if their "you can take your account with you to a new service" claim works would be for Bluesky to collapse, and given that their monetization model is -- selling domains, I guess? -- it seems like we won't have to wait too long once the venture capital dries up for that.
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Re: This is Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
A blog. You invented the blog.
Re:This is Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
So that when you change email providers you no longer get email sent to that address (unless you can get a forwarding service, and assuming it doesn't go down)? Do you consider that a desirable trait? That's *obviously* a bad thing - it's just a bad thing you're used to.
That's one of the many design flaws of Mastodon - that your domain is part of your handle, and that's how things get routed to you. In ATProto (Bluesky), your handle is just metadata. You're actually indexed by a unique DID (Decentralized ID), which can be associated with any domain at any point in time.
And here's just some of the flaws with that plan [pfrazee.com].
Or, you know, you could have one or more indexing servers built into the architecture itself so that your network behaves as a unified whole instead of a bunch of isolated fiefdoms (which ATProto does and Mastodon/ActivityPub does not - contrary to popular belief, yes, ATProto IS designed to let Appviews run their own indexing servers if they want, or to subscribe to as many as they want, but there's generally little need. ATProto focuses heavily on decoupling of roles, while Mastodon crams all roles into every server, making their admins like gods of their given realm).
ActivityPub is an antique architecture with a lot of design flaws. ATProto was designed specifically to fix its flaws. There's been many years of thought and debate over all issues related to this, from people who have been working in this space for a long time.
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I don't see any reason that social media couldn't work more like email. Though I disagree with the HTML5 part. A simple URL for any content that isn't text should be more than adequate.
You signup for a service (or run your own server) and get a social media address just like you get an email address today. You "follow" someone by adding their address to your client, which would send a notification. Your client could then periodically poll for new posts, or maybe also allow people you follow to push their
Re:This is Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
You know literally nothing about what you're writing about, and everyone who modded you to 5 needs to be less trusting.
It does not use IPFS [atproto.com]
It does not use "Web3 stuff" (aka crypto/blockchain) [atproto.com]
It's structured entirely different from Mastodon, and specifically to avoid the problems that Mastodon has [atproto.com], so that interaction between and migration between servers is entirely seamless, the whole network functions as a single global whole regardless of your appview, and moderation is decoupled from appviews (the "server" you connect to).
Bluesky runs two federated instances internally and has been slowly migrating users across them as it runs testing on scaleup (as mentioned, unlike Mastodon, migration is seamless on Bluesky from a user perspective - nothing changes for you). Features get released when they're ready, not when they're half-baked, unstable, and/or liable to change.
Everything about it is open-source [github.com]. What you're actually asking for is for the code for incomplete features to be released before the features are actually done.
Bluesky was not "created by Twitter devs". Bluesky's proposal came from Jay Graber [wikipedia.org], in response to a request for proposals from Twitter for a distributed social networking protocol that didn't have Mastodon's design flaws and could make for a seamless user experience. In the negotiations that followed, Graber managed to keep Bluesky independent from Twitter and function as a contractor, which ultimately proved very fortunate, given history. None of its devs are "Twitter Devs". For example, one of the most well known devs is Paul Frazee [pfrazee.com], whose background is peer-to-peer apps.
You know literally nothing about what you're talking about.
First off, your "selling domains" thing comes from a blog post [bsky.social] which simultaneously debunks most of the other ridiculous things you wrote, so do you even read?
Like Mastodon, Bluesky will take any revenue stream available to them. Mastodon has more than demonstrated (even with its highly inefficient design and terrible media handling) that funding social media operation costs is eminently workable, with most servers neither doing fees nor ads, and purely just donations.
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It does not use IPFS [atproto.com]
And go literally one link below that to data model [atproto.com] and you'll discover that the core discover mechanism uses IPLD, which is a distributed hash map implemented over IPFS.
It does not use "Web3 stuff" (aka crypto/blockchain) [atproto.com]
Web3 covers more than just blockchain and cryptocurrency. It also covers things like the distributed identity that they use and IPFS. The CEO of Bluesky comes straight from a cryptocurrency company due to her experience with Web3 technologies. The whole mechanism for linking a DID to a backend is Web3.
Just because they don't use a blockchain
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IPLD is a *format specification*. IPFS is built on IPLD. Bluesky does not use IPFS. Period. That claim is wrong.
Bluesky in its early years considered using IPFS (there's some diagrams from the Matrix room that show it). They ultimately didn't. But at the same time, if you want a user or content to be addressable across serv
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** invested in the new company
** witchcraft
Re: This is Slashdot (Score:1)
Details would be nice, the fact is the protocols they pretend to have arenâ(TM)t actually used and what they have is incomplete and quite a bit of the promise of portability and decentralization they havenâ(TM)t figured out yet.
Right now it is a centralized Twitter clone. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Explain what about this protocol looks centralized to you [atproto.com].
Are you damning them for not being finished, is that what's going on? They run multiple appviews internally.
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Important pieces have not been finalized, both in the reference implementation and in the public specifications. Again, look at the documentation and tell me what IS finished that would make it a non-centralized system. Here is the list of things "not finished":
Account Migration, Repository Sync, Repository Event Stream, Blob Export, Moderation Primitives
Reading through the docs, it tells you outright, right now, your account is not portable, you can't hook into the system at any level and we don't have a c
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So what you're damning them for is "not being finished", not what they're very obviously working towards and making great progress with.
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The problem, as I said, is that they haven't made progress in 3 years. Use the wayback machine and see how 'quickly' they developed these features, the page hasn't changed significantly in 3 years. Any group of developers worth their salt should have come up with a solution in 3 years.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
Now maybe people will stop posting zillions of messages asking for or offering invites. It really is sad how effective these idiotic marketing campaigns are.
Personally, I refuse to use any system where people are blocked from access if they don't have an account. I'm used to an Internet where you need an account to post content, but not to read it. Fuck gated communities.
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Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
It's sad but this is fast becoming normal. I've recently been very disappointed to see that a lot of content is now being posted to Discord. It's no longer searchable on the public Internet, you have to join their little "Discord server" to even see it. I don't think the youth of today even understand what a "web site" is... it's either an app or it doesn't exist.
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I disliked the shift from Usenet to web forums, but web forums are at least still usable, still searchable, not so insular, far more readable...
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
You do understand that it was "gated" specifically to slow down the scaleup so they wouldn't be swamped by waves of Twitter refugees that they couldn't handle every time Musk did something stupid, right?
By gating it with invites, and adjusting how fast they gave them out, they could control the scaleup speed.
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No, it was marketing. They're not the first ones to do this "invitation only" bullshit.
Requires a mobile number to join (Score:5, Informative)
Requires a mobile number to join. Sorry, but hard pass.
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Yeah, that's BS. Bad enough they want an email address. Guess I'm sticking with Mastodon.
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Bad news, they already know it.
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Lol, what exactly are you looking for - a site to share child porn?
Yeah, social media sites have rules like "don't use us to commit crime" and "don't threaten to kill our other members". OMG.
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> social media sites have rules
The promise of Bluesky is that it's a protocol, not a site.
What content rules does SMTP have?
To whom so I have to give my phone number to register for SMTP?
I get it - Warren and Haley are pushing hard to get you an Internet License with a Censorship Board to say what's allowed.
Pay attention to post-quantum crypto so we can route around damage.
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> social media sites have rules
The promise of Bluesky is that it's a protocol, not a site.
If it's a protocol, it's not a very good one since there's already a standard and adopted protocol for that, it's called ActivityPub. But it isn't a protocol, it's a site, and it will never be self-hostable because that'll eat into corporate control too much.
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ATProto was specifically created *because* ActivityPub is so awful and poorly implemented. You can't "fix" ActivityPub, its core design is flawed.
And ATProto is not "a site".
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Don't commit a crime, don't threaten to kill people you're talking to (crime), don't share child porn (crime), etc?
What does that have to do with a code of conduct? That's about gating [slashdot.org].
The irony is, I think you'd greatly prefer the moderation system being developed at Bluesky [slashdot.org] over convention
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They'll probably drop it eventually, but for now it's another "gating" mechanism to slow down the creation of new headaches for the dev team (in this case, making bulk attacks against the system harder - spam, bots, DoS, etc). They didn't have it under the invite system because invites themselves are a gating mechanism.
Nice timing (Score:2)
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there are 3, including Vk https://vk.com/?lang=en [vk.com]
Re: Nice timing (Score:2)
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There are even more if you count whatever is used in China.
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The problem is that Weibo has approximately zero market share outside of the Sinophone sphere, and as far as I can tell it has no real interest in changing that.
It is hard to call something an "alternative platform to Twitter" if even basic documentation like the "registration help" links on their signup page are only in Chinese. Meanwhile you can't get serious penetration in China as a media platform unless you get the buy-in of the Chinese government. The net result is that these platforms aren't even in
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Bluesky launched a year ago. But they don't have Meta's budget, so the dev team is smaller. And Threads was just adopting a modified version of Mastodon, whereas Bluesky is far more ambitious, to fix the flaws in Mastodon/ActivityPub's design.
IMHO, Threads being based on ActivityPub is mostly just marketing. Their federation initiatives, while not nonexistent, have been minimal (plus like half of Mastodon servers plan to defederate Threads anyway because they don't trust it). And under Mastodon's archite
The better parts of twitter interface..? (Score:1)
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Says a loser soapboxing his dumb opinion on a platform.
Re: Don't care (Score:1)
I thought you were talking about IDE's for a second....
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Thanks. Elon.
No one cares about your Nazi echo chamber.
Another social media app I won't use (Score:2)
The real question is ... (Score:1)
... will this become just another internet cesspool?
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It's working toward a unique moderation approach. Specifically, that users can create moderation services where they tag people's posts with moderation metadata, and any users can subscribe to any moderation services they want, and what they want to happen with posts flagged by their moderation services (content warning, just plain disappear, etc). So moderation can be hyper-finetuned - someone could make, say, a moderation service that blocks any comments about Elon Musk except ones taunting him, or what
ATDT1800GOAWAY (Score:2)
Untouchable (Score:2, Interesting)
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Good news - Jack isn't involved. (He started a chat group about it, a bunch of third parties joined, Jack sent out an RFP, Jay's proposal won, Jay started Bluesky as a new company with an investment from Jack (for which he got one board seat and a single digit stake), Jay's team developed Bluesky/ATProto, Jack joined, discovered that the users there largely hate him, and left)
And ATProto was designed specifically BECAUSE ActivityPub is so deeply flawed.
ActivityPub Flawed? (Score:1)
It's been a while since I've looked at the ActivityP