We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky
50 comments
·January 19, 2025idlewords
enos_feedler
I agree and don't believe 1) is the killer app for 2) but it definitely helps make 2) viable because at least there is a production social app running on it.
neilv
I can't tell why the writers feel that Bluesky's AT protocol is somehow the technologically best, or most politically strategic foundation, for a viable open mechanism for this kind of communication.
This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.
(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")
DeepPhilosopher
Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.
Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.
And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.
To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?
bruce511
Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.
Let's start with "no one has heard of mastodon" because no one is spending money marketing it to joe public. Sure it'll spread by word of mouth, but honestly that's not terribly compelling (because most of the current mouths are, um, the same people ranting about the incumbents. )
I don't disagree that the same process leads to the same outcome. I personally don't think bluesky will ultimately be any different to the rest.
But the no-money approach of mastodon means its a very very slow burn, which will take a decade or more to succeed, and even then may not be what we expect when a billion people show up.
davidcbc
It's because people don't care about federated services, they care about services that are easy to use and have people on them and that's bluesky right now
DeepPhilosopher
Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter?
IAmGraydon
Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms. Now, not only can you subscribe to those with like opinions, but the collective can reject dissenting opinions en masse. What could go wrong?
pixl97
The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
Why should I listen to the endless amount of slop flat earthers shat upon the internet at large?
The early internet was a pretty decent place to talk, debate, and see opinions you didn't agree with. But those days are long gone. He'll, these days the other side of the conversation could just be a bot that will never change its mind, and waste your time you could be talking to an actual human.
ianburrell
Usenet had kill files. It was invented before the Internet was widespread. There was even a term, plonk, for adding someone usually as parting message.
Kill files were required for reading Usenet. There were less bad posters, but since saw everything in newsgroup, it helped to filter the problems.
nbittich
The internet of the 2000s was good because it didn't have these "discover" and "for you" algorithms. If you were interested in a subject, you actually had to search and filter results to find what you wanted; no AI choosing for you. If you're not interested in politics, you shouldn't see political content, unless you specifically search for it.
computerthings
> The internet is filled with shit. Bots, influencers, spammers, the clinically insane, outright enemies.
And also with people who just add people they consider enemies for whatever reason to all sorts of lists, and others who just subscribe to those lists blindly, without ever checking any. Why would they want to, it's supposedly unsavory.
Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it. Just because it says "list of X" doesn't mean it's a list of X, it just means anyone can title things however they like.
Starlevel004
> Being able to share block lists sounds like a perfect formula for an even more extreme version of the social media echo chamber effect we've seen on other platforms.
I like my echo chamber. I like talking to my friends online. I don't want things I don't want to see.
numpad0
Doubt it, Twitter had that feature years ago and there wasn't a major problem that linked to it.
Crazy people can't follow protocols, and most realizes they're in the wrong before blocking million accounts. References to useful contents from blocked accounts will occasionally leak through channels, and that should validate/invalidate choices.
It's probably a pain for spammers and an extra processing cost for serving platform, though.
edit: if you consider it must to block massive amount of real users(i.e. not script bots and/or third world hired guns trying to destroy a platform) to use a platform normally, that's just not sane.
NewJazz
You call it "social media echo chamber" I call it "not exposing myself, family, or friends to gore or lewd content".
baobun
Sounds better than everyone outsourcing the same to Musk, Zuck, spez, or similar.
kiba
Hacker News is heavily curated. Do you think there's an echo chamber effect? I frequently encountered opinions that differ from mine, sometime completely on the opposite end.
NoMoreNicksLeft
As much as I like and enjoy HN most of the time, it's very much an echo chamber. Even if we ignore politics and politics-adjacent threads and focus on tech stuff, there are some popular perceptions/opinions that have not earned their popularity, and god help you should you suggest you're not on that bandwagon. The blanket ban on outright politics here may blunt the echo chamber effect a bit, but it exists because echo chamber susceptibility is part of the human condition. We cannot get away from it.
bruce511
While there's a ban on overt politics, a lot of social discourse is ultimately political.
It's impossible to discuss health care approaches for example. Americans believe in for profit Healthcare, while (most everyone else) tend to favor universal health care (despite its many imperfections. )
And that's before we discuss other tricky topics like the military etc. There are plenty of folk ready to downvote based on opinion rather than discussion.
So yes, there's plenty of echo chamber here - but equally plenty of alternate thinkers, not to mention nutters.
This is ultimately how human societies work.
toomuchtodo
Educated people will remain educated. Ignorant people will remain ignorant. Angry people will remain angry. Block lists aren’t going to make a material difference in winning hearts and minds. The average reading level in the United States is between 7th and 8th grade, for example. Users will pick what they want to read, and they should be able to.
adolph
I wonder what’s the max lexile score for 144 characters
toomuchtodo
Seems to be the wrong measure for the angry dopamine machine. I should’ve mentioned critical thinking and emotional intelligence as well in my first comment. Citations below.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-71263-z
https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430608-trending-science-...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/mit-sloan-study-finds-thinkin...
mrshadowgoose
From my admittedly subjective perspective, it's the lesser of two evils. The alternative of having centralized control of "truth" is a far more awful option.
crznp
I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.
verdverm
Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user. There is also the issue that your account is tied to a specific server and migration means you lose your followers. Discovery and server DDoS on a viral post are also challenges for the way ActivityPub was architected.
ATProto is still young, even compared to ActivityPub. It will continue to evolve and improve. It certainly has the momentum compared to ActivityPub
BeetleB
> Mastadon is too complicated for your average, non-technical user.
The only headache is picking the server. If I pick one for them it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
If someone can't handle the basic interface, there's a really really high chance he doesn't have much of value to say.
The problem isn't that it's "complicated". It's that they have no incentive to sign up.
As much as the HN crowd hates it, ads and marketing work. People went to Bluesky not because it's easier but because several famous people talked about it loudly and everyone knows the people behind the original Twitter are behind it.
Marketing.
verdverm
The problem I've heard others bring up is that you pick a server, then later the moderation policies of the admins changes. You can either deal with it or start over again on another server. Losing all your followers is why people put up with bad social media overlords.
ATProto removes the switching cost. This is a significant difference from ActivityPub
CharlesW
> I largely agree, but it is odd to write that column and not mention Mastodon/ActivityPub.
Is that an omission, or is that because Mastodon is already in the process of "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship"¹, and because ActivityPub was published as a W3C Recommendation back in 2018?
¹ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-...
zeckalpha
No mention of their benefit corporation status
pornel
They're right that they need to actually shift the power away from Bluesky and have users use other servers.
The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.
As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.
adolph
wants to create a nonprofit foundation to govern and protect the AT Protocol, outside of Bluesky the company
Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can’t rely on them.
What’s the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking away. Just do it.
llvm-dev
[dead]
ThalesX
[flagged]
jagger27
Perhaps take a moment to consider the actual real world impact that _reach_ has on the balance of power. Your conspiracy blog doesn't tip the scales, you're right. Consider who you'd have to pay to make it stick.
Call it "left leaning" in that it's critical of the historically high imbalance of wealth and media capture that the literal right wing _currently has_ and is _currently consolidating_.
lazzlazzlazz
Interesting how the online left now is beginning to care about decentralizing social media again after years of deriding the topic and espousing (obviously politicized) "content moderation" efforts.
Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain people (like Farcaster) — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).
Bluesky is two completely separate things:
1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.
2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.
There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.
I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.