12 ms·

Bluesky Is a Scam

77 points by whoisninja 3y ago

wmf 3y ago
This is... the least charitable possible interpretation of the current state of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. It's not wrong, but it's not clear that it will be right either. Personally I would have preferred if they implemented federation before going into beta because that is the whole point of a decentralized network. But OTOH there is an opportunity right now to lure people away from Twitter and that opportunity may not exist in a few months. I don't think progressive decentralization, over a span of months not years, is inherently evil.
- manojlds 3y ago
  From what the CEO said, they were giving out invites from the start and no one was using them and then suddenly the momentum hit and everything was gobbled up and lot more than they anticipated joined.
i_love_cookies 3y ago
[dead]
evbogue 3y ago
> The DID itself is derived from the sha256 hash of the first operation in the log. It is then base32 encoded and truncated to 24 chars. https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works They could be using public keys as identifiers, why are they using nonsense?
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  Would public keys be recoverable without having the private key, one of their objectives? They also say: “We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized.”
  - evbogue 3y ago
    They could replace it with allowing you to hold onto your own keypair.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  because they want the ability to perform key rotation
  - evbogue 3y ago
    well exactly. If they hold onto your private keys for you, then they can keep you from losing them and also give you a new public key on a set schedule. but they're also holding into your private keys for you, which comes with some risks.
threeseed 3y ago
> because of that they are tricking a lot of people into using them This may come as a surprise. But your average cool, interesting person doesn't care whether Bluesky has a decentralised protocol or the intricacies of its identity model. The reason most people are using it is because it's the closest thing to a Musk-less Twitter.
- mjfl 3y ago
  Which is funny because this demographic values blocking, banning, and censorship very highly while these are exactly the sort of things Nostr and Bluesky are designed to prevent.
  - _x2o9 3y ago
    Irony is lost on these authoritarians who are anti-free speech.
    - mjfl 3y ago
      Totally, see the other reply thread - not even the engineers building it seem to understand the irony.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Bluesky at least is not design to prevent "blocking, banning, and censorship" at all, not sure where you get that idea from. Blocking/moderation/"censorship" will happen from people's own actions, or subscribing to someone else's actions. If you want, you can just not participate in blocking/moderation at all and have a raw view, but most people will probably opt-in to a moderated view, as the internet is usually (not always) viewed with a moderated perspective.
    - mjfl 3y ago
      Huh? But blocking someone on a distributed protocol seems impossible? to block someone, or censor them, you would have to get every node in the network to cooperate. Sure you can “mute” someone and not see their posts personally pretty easily. But if you want to make it so that others can’t see someone’s posts, like Alex Jones or Trump, and generally block the public from seeing them, this action seems much harder.
cxr 3y ago
The solution to the problem of centralization that Bluesky has been touted as tackling (and that Mastodon doesn't deal with in a satisfactory way) doesn't look anything like Bluesky or Twitter or Mastodon. Instead, it's just making RSS (read: Atom) suck less. Crazy that no one in the relevant circles seems to have realized that microblog posts don't require anything more sophisticated than what a static site generator can produce. The heavyweight server-to-server protocols that we've seen are just way too heavy.
- Alacart 3y ago
  This is how I've been feeling but I'm assuming there's more to this that I just don't know. I keep thinking, what if we: 1. Use domains/subdomains as usernames by just... having the content on them. 2. Follow a truly basic structure for index (feed), single post, etc. so that clients know how to consume them easily. 3. For interactions (replies, likes, etc), the client posts them to your own server (or service hosting you) and they're available at a url referencing the original post url on their own domain. ex) mydomain.com/replies/thepostsurl/1 4. It then posts the reply url to the original posts server endpoint, which can accept or not. 5. When a user loads the post, it lists the replies and interactions as a list of links. the client goes and gets their content directly, and renders it. This would work without any servers actually having to talk to each other or store more than a link for interactions. If you want to confirm the interaction url on receiving a submission, your server could check but it doesn't need to store or cache it. Am I crazy or would this not work just fine? or, is this what activity pub already is?
  - tobinfekkes 3y ago
    I like this a lot. It also addresses (maybe even solves?) the moderation issue, which is the harriest problem to solve when content is centralized.
  - cxr 3y ago
    That's still too heavyweight. You have just described something that is more complex than what a static site generator can produce. My static site doesn't have an "endpoint" for people to post notifications to. A like is nothing more than a way of saying, "I like this". Think. You can come up with a way to do this that doesn't require you to abandon RSS (read: Atom). If Alice posts something and Bob likes it, then he can say so—from his perspective, he clicks "Like", and in turn this just ends up as another entry in his own feed. He doesn't need write permission to anything on Alice's server, and Alice doesn't need a smart (social protocol-aware) daemon sitting on the line listening. If Alice is subscribed to Bob's feed, then she's already lined up to get it. If she's not subscribed to Bob's feed (and maybe even doesn't know he exists) but is so neurotic/insecure that she craves validation from strangers on the Internet after years of conditioning on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and HN, then she can subscribe to Marge's feed. Marge is Alice's friend. Marge casts a wide net (follows a lot of people) and keeps an eye out for anyone saying they liked Alice's shitposts. When she notices, she lets Alice know: Marge squirts an entry into her own feed saying, "hey, Alice, look over here at Bob saying he liked your shitty Beetlejuice tribute" (which is pretty much exactly the mechanism behind boosts/retweets—except these would be boosts/retweets not of content but of what is known at least in the XMPP vernacular as "presence" information). Also, Marge is actually Facebook/Google/whoever, once they realize how lucrative it is to have this kind of influence and mandate in the next generation of social media. Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612>
nr2x 3y ago
It’s fine to have a rational disagreement about systems design and deployment, but this borders on paranoid screed. Just because you don’t like something and other people do doesn’t mean it’s a scam.
iso8859-1 3y ago
note that fiatjaf is the creator of nostr, which is a competing product
- evbogue 3y ago
  But are they really competing products?
- sph 3y ago
  Also recipient of a ~$250k grant to develop NOSTR from Jack Dorsey himself, who is also behind Bluesky... Biting the hand that fed him.
  - voytec 3y ago
    Dorsey also has stakes in Musk's Twitter.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    I'm fairly sure Jack is currently just trying to get any social media effort off the ground, and throw money at a bunch of different efforts, hoping at least one of them work. He been pretty open about that process on Bluesky at least.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
basically he's mad nostril isn't gaining traction
mvkel 3y ago
It may be a scam technically, and it may succeed commercially
camgunz 3y ago
Bluesky's innovation over Twitter is to try and free itself from onerous regulation and scrutiny by governments. Their defense, over and over again, will be "just run 'govsky'", "just run 'chinasky'", "we can't censor you, no need to start Truth Social (lol), also no need to give us super burdensome regulatory requirements." They're doing things a little backwards, building a gmail before there's a big SMTP network out there, but that's smart. The default state of this positioning now is that they'll slowly drain Twitter of their attention capital ( this is on purpose; their UX is the Twitter UX) so Elon has to respond somehow.
- Kye 3y ago
  That's not an innovation. The EU itself and at least one EU country's government already have Mastodon instances. Quite a few organizations have as well. Truth Social is a fork of Mastodon. Where is Bluesky's innovation?
  - camgunz 3y ago
    "Innovation over Twitter" is what I said. I think ActivityPub and Mastodon are alright, but I think a thing that looks and behaves more like Twitter will be more successful at succeeding it than something that doesn't. I get that Mastodon people are salty about Bluesky. Personally I was hoping Elon Musk buying Twitter would be taking the Jenga piece that collapses the social media tower. But this is how nerds vs capitalists goes, unfortunately, and my evidence is all the walled gardens that sprung up in the fertile pre-web-2.0 internet.
    - Kye 3y ago
      Being the second to do something (without significant improvement) isn't what I could consider innovative by any definition I know. Mastodon already did the things you listed. Can you clarify what you mean? It sounds like you expect Bluesky to do what Mastodon already did, but better somehow.
      - camgunz 3y ago
Laaas 3y ago
Why does everyone forget Matrix? There have been multiple truly decentralised Twitter clones on top of Matrix.
- phoe-krk 3y ago
  No aggressive promotion, no VC-esque backing. Which is very good for Matrix.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
kyledrake 3y ago
Very cool and very normal to crank off about decentralization/moderation and then have people in the author's comments section threatening people with violence. It's almost as if there are a lot of intricacies around making these networks work well for people and there's more problems to be solved than just raw unmoderated decentralization if you want to foster a healthy community that doesn't devolve into a tiny fraction of the worst people on earth.
drngdds 3y ago
Not necessarily endorsing this (I haven't looked into the details of Bluesky myself) but one thing I don't understand is - how does Bluesky intend to make money? Have they announced a plan? It's a corporation, so obviously they have something in mind. But googling about it, I can't find a good answer. Centralized social networks bank heavily on the network effect, but you don't really have that if you make a genuinely decentralized network like Bluesky says they're trying to.
3000 3y ago
name is important, agree or not. this name, bluesky wont fly.

77 points by whoisninja 3y ago

wmf 3y ago

This is... the least charitable possible interpretation of the current state of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. It's not wrong, but it's not clear that it will be right either. Personally I would have preferred if they implemented federation before going into beta because that is the whole point of a decentralized network. But OTOH there is an opportunity right now to lure people away from Twitter and that opportunity may not exist in a few months. I don't think progressive decentralization, over a span of months not years, is inherently evil.

manojlds 3y ago
From what the CEO said, they were giving out invites from the start and no one was using them and then suddenly the momentum hit and everything was gobbled up and lot more than they anticipated joined.

i_love_cookies 3y ago

[dead]

evbogue 3y ago

> The DID itself is derived from the sha256 hash of the first operation in the log. It is then base32 encoded and truncated to 24 chars. https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works https://atproto.com/specs/did-plc#how-it-works They could be using public keys as identifiers, why are they using nonsense?

UncleEntity 3y ago
Would public keys be recoverable without having the private key, one of their objectives? They also say: “We're actively hoping to replace it with something less centralized.”
- evbogue 3y ago
  They could replace it with allowing you to hold onto your own keypair.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
because they want the ability to perform key rotation
- evbogue 3y ago
  well exactly. If they hold onto your private keys for you, then they can keep you from losing them and also give you a new public key on a set schedule. but they're also holding into your private keys for you, which comes with some risks.

threeseed 3y ago

> because of that they are tricking a lot of people into using them This may come as a surprise. But your average cool, interesting person doesn't care whether Bluesky has a decentralised protocol or the intricacies of its identity model. The reason most people are using it is because it's the closest thing to a Musk-less Twitter.

mjfl 3y ago
Which is funny because this demographic values blocking, banning, and censorship very highly while these are exactly the sort of things Nostr and Bluesky are designed to prevent.
- _x2o9 3y ago
  Irony is lost on these authoritarians who are anti-free speech.
  - mjfl 3y ago
    Totally, see the other reply thread - not even the engineers building it seem to understand the irony.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- capableweb 3y ago
  Bluesky at least is not design to prevent "blocking, banning, and censorship" at all, not sure where you get that idea from. Blocking/moderation/"censorship" will happen from people's own actions, or subscribing to someone else's actions. If you want, you can just not participate in blocking/moderation at all and have a raw view, but most people will probably opt-in to a moderated view, as the internet is usually (not always) viewed with a moderated perspective.
  - mjfl 3y ago
    Huh? But blocking someone on a distributed protocol seems impossible? to block someone, or censor them, you would have to get every node in the network to cooperate. Sure you can “mute” someone and not see their posts personally pretty easily. But if you want to make it so that others can’t see someone’s posts, like Alex Jones or Trump, and generally block the public from seeing them, this action seems much harder.

cxr 3y ago

The solution to the problem of centralization that Bluesky has been touted as tackling (and that Mastodon doesn't deal with in a satisfactory way) doesn't look anything like Bluesky or Twitter or Mastodon. Instead, it's just making RSS (read: Atom) suck less. Crazy that no one in the relevant circles seems to have realized that microblog posts don't require anything more sophisticated than what a static site generator can produce. The heavyweight server-to-server protocols that we've seen are just way too heavy.

Alacart 3y ago
This is how I've been feeling but I'm assuming there's more to this that I just don't know. I keep thinking, what if we: 1. Use domains/subdomains as usernames by just... having the content on them. 2. Follow a truly basic structure for index (feed), single post, etc. so that clients know how to consume them easily. 3. For interactions (replies, likes, etc), the client posts them to your own server (or service hosting you) and they're available at a url referencing the original post url on their own domain. ex) mydomain.com/replies/thepostsurl/1 4. It then posts the reply url to the original posts server endpoint, which can accept or not. 5. When a user loads the post, it lists the replies and interactions as a list of links. the client goes and gets their content directly, and renders it. This would work without any servers actually having to talk to each other or store more than a link for interactions. If you want to confirm the interaction url on receiving a submission, your server could check but it doesn't need to store or cache it. Am I crazy or would this not work just fine? or, is this what activity pub already is?
- tobinfekkes 3y ago
  I like this a lot. It also addresses (maybe even solves?) the moderation issue, which is the harriest problem to solve when content is centralized.
- cxr 3y ago
  That's still too heavyweight. You have just described something that is more complex than what a static site generator can produce. My static site doesn't have an "endpoint" for people to post notifications to. A like is nothing more than a way of saying, "I like this". Think. You can come up with a way to do this that doesn't require you to abandon RSS (read: Atom). If Alice posts something and Bob likes it, then he can say so—from his perspective, he clicks "Like", and in turn this just ends up as another entry in his own feed. He doesn't need write permission to anything on Alice's server, and Alice doesn't need a smart (social protocol-aware) daemon sitting on the line listening. If Alice is subscribed to Bob's feed, then she's already lined up to get it. If she's not subscribed to Bob's feed (and maybe even doesn't know he exists) but is so neurotic/insecure that she craves validation from strangers on the Internet after years of conditioning on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and HN, then she can subscribe to Marge's feed. Marge is Alice's friend. Marge casts a wide net (follows a lot of people) and keeps an eye out for anyone saying they liked Alice's shitposts. When she notices, she lets Alice know: Marge squirts an entry into her own feed saying, "hey, Alice, look over here at Bob saying he liked your shitty Beetlejuice tribute" (which is pretty much exactly the mechanism behind boosts/retweets—except these would be boosts/retweets not of content but of what is known at least in the XMPP vernacular as "presence" information). Also, Marge is actually Facebook/Google/whoever, once they realize how lucrative it is to have this kind of influence and mandate in the next generation of social media. Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612>

nr2x 3y ago

It’s fine to have a rational disagreement about systems design and deployment, but this borders on paranoid screed. Just because you don’t like something and other people do doesn’t mean it’s a scam.

iso8859-1 3y ago

note that fiatjaf is the creator of nostr, which is a competing product

evbogue 3y ago
But are they really competing products?
sph 3y ago
Also recipient of a ~$250k grant to develop NOSTR from Jack Dorsey himself, who is also behind Bluesky... Biting the hand that fed him.
- voytec 3y ago
  Dorsey also has stakes in Musk's Twitter.
- capableweb 3y ago
  I'm fairly sure Jack is currently just trying to get any social media effort off the ground, and throw money at a bunch of different efforts, hoping at least one of them work. He been pretty open about that process on Bluesky at least.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

basically he's mad nostril isn't gaining traction

mvkel 3y ago

It may be a scam technically, and it may succeed commercially

camgunz 3y ago

Bluesky's innovation over Twitter is to try and free itself from onerous regulation and scrutiny by governments. Their defense, over and over again, will be "just run 'govsky'", "just run 'chinasky'", "we can't censor you, no need to start Truth Social (lol), also no need to give us super burdensome regulatory requirements." They're doing things a little backwards, building a gmail before there's a big SMTP network out there, but that's smart. The default state of this positioning now is that they'll slowly drain Twitter of their attention capital ( this is on purpose; their UX is the Twitter UX) so Elon has to respond somehow.

Kye 3y ago
That's not an innovation. The EU itself and at least one EU country's government already have Mastodon instances. Quite a few organizations have as well. Truth Social is a fork of Mastodon. Where is Bluesky's innovation?
- camgunz 3y ago
  "Innovation over Twitter" is what I said. I think ActivityPub and Mastodon are alright, but I think a thing that looks and behaves more like Twitter will be more successful at succeeding it than something that doesn't. I get that Mastodon people are salty about Bluesky. Personally I was hoping Elon Musk buying Twitter would be taking the Jenga piece that collapses the social media tower. But this is how nerds vs capitalists goes, unfortunately, and my evidence is all the walled gardens that sprung up in the fertile pre-web-2.0 internet.
  - Kye 3y ago
    Being the second to do something (without significant improvement) isn't what I could consider innovative by any definition I know. Mastodon already did the things you listed. Can you clarify what you mean? It sounds like you expect Bluesky to do what Mastodon already did, but better somehow.
    - camgunz 3y ago

Laaas 3y ago

Why does everyone forget Matrix? There have been multiple truly decentralised Twitter clones on top of Matrix.

phoe-krk 3y ago
No aggressive promotion, no VC-esque backing. Which is very good for Matrix.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

kyledrake 3y ago

Very cool and very normal to crank off about decentralization/moderation and then have people in the author's comments section threatening people with violence. It's almost as if there are a lot of intricacies around making these networks work well for people and there's more problems to be solved than just raw unmoderated decentralization if you want to foster a healthy community that doesn't devolve into a tiny fraction of the worst people on earth.

drngdds 3y ago

Not necessarily endorsing this (I haven't looked into the details of Bluesky myself) but one thing I don't understand is - how does Bluesky intend to make money? Have they announced a plan? It's a corporation, so obviously they have something in mind. But googling about it, I can't find a good answer. Centralized social networks bank heavily on the network effect, but you don't really have that if you make a genuinely decentralized network like Bluesky says they're trying to.

3000 3y ago

name is important, agree or not. this name, bluesky wont fly.