We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

IMO what kills Mastodon is what us nerds say is the single important point about Mastodon: federation.

Stay with me...

So: federation is very cool in principle, and it's extremely cool in that it in theory means we don't have Just One Batshit Master of all our content... but in the way it's being done with Masto, it IMHO makes for a weak proposition.

Why?

Mainly because people (normal people, not us lot) don't understand or care what "federation" is. They expect (because it's been the norm for every other service), a SINGLE place where they can go to find their mates and celebs and politicians.

What they instead get is a thing where:

1) They can't search a global place and find all those people they want to find (why the Mastodon team don't have this as the #1 thing they are working on, who knows)

2) They find someone on one "instance" (not understanding what an "instance" is) and then can't (easily) follow them from their own instance without having to think about namespaces and all that

3) They naturally gravitate towards the biggest one - probably mastodon.social - and then we're right back at the beginning, with everyone on a single instance, beholden to the possibly loony who might shut it down / monetise it / etc

Moving between instances is much harder than it is claimed to be (you lose all sorts of stuff like your history, or at least you did when I tried it).

Federation also brings all manner of hard things to those trying to run an instance - I tried, as "medium level nerd" and ended up walking away from the complexity of just not understanding why some content didn't seem to be getting from my instance to others, etc etc.

If I was the Mastodon team, I'd be focusing all my attention on global search, and on never using the word "federated" in any of their marketing ever again. It might well be the coolest thing, but it's a non-marketable thing.

Of course all this is predicated on "a good outcome" being "everyone on Mastodon" and I do appreciate those who don't want that. It's definitely the case that less people tends to make for better online social spaces, and maybe small niche groups leads to better things all round.

> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.

Which is a good thing from the spec point of view but maybe bad from a user adoption point of view. Even for the later you'd be wrong, as Threads is supposed to be an ActivityPub application.

I don't really care whether it's got a ton of people though. I do care if it's truly free and federated.

It's for the same reason I don't recommend Signal to anyone in my circle. I don't want to trade one walled garden for another (Signal still refuses third-party clients for example). I use Matrix which is truly open.

> Mastodon lacks what BlueSky has - a company with money driving the experience forward and getting everyone going in the same direction.

You mean, it lacks centralization?

>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

While I think Mastodon's irrelevance is deserved, let's also be fair to the "incumbents": Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, et al. gained and maintain their critical mass from word of mouth.

Many other would-be upstarts in history also usurped thrones by word of mouth, foremost example being Firefox against Internet Explorer.

Mastodon's problem with becoming relevant (and also BlueSky's problem with upending Mysterious Twitter X) is far more fundamental than lack of awareness.

TruthSocial is a forked Mastodon

I do not think that for service to be dependent on some particular company is successful way to do it. It is successful to deliver some kind of service but, as we have many examples from and post- web2.0, that service does not have desired outcome.

Anyway I have checked several social medias today (HN included) and everywhere except one place there was too much noise about TikTok - only place that my feed was without it was Mastodon - it is quite slow there but i consder it to be good thing. However I think that there is no good social media - Mastodon included and my days would be improved without any of them. RSS feeds feels like more then enough. Discussion seems to be mostly point-less. Maybe even this one, but those enhanced with algorithmic engagement and endless scroll are net-negative.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that coders will argue about protocol and what that says about someone’s personality - anytime, anywhere.

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 that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?

The tying of identity to one’s home instance is IMHO a fatal flaw. Absolutely fundamental error in a decentralized system, making it effectively not decentralized.

It’s understandable in ancient protocols like email where storage was at such a premium that universal replication was out and cryptography was primitive. It’s not forgivable today.

I am ignorant of AT — does it have this problem? I know that Nostr doesn’t and it’s always struck me as technically superior. Problem is there is nothing on there but Bitcoiners and all the topics adjacent to that subculture.

> And the third one is it takes them forever to ship updates. Bluesky is so much faster moving when it comes to implementing new features, but Mastodon ships even slower than Twitter which is an "achievement" in itself.

Mastodon is a non-profit with a handfull of engineers. How can you compare their resources to something like Bluesky or even Twitter, that has thousands of engineers, is beyond me.

so... it's IRC all over again. I wonder why we need a new protocol for that

People one go where the technologically literate tell them go. If it wasn't for me, my family and friends wouldn't have gone on iOS, WhatsApp, Signal, you name it. If we give the thumbs up they know it's not bad if they migrate. Of course they can still decide against something if they don't see the value, but we can have significant impact on what platforms they use or not.

What confession? Link? I haven’t heard of this

99% of normies use platforms that offer only one dictatorial fiefdom. Picking the biggest server is better than that option. Picking a server at random is better than that option.

99% of normies can just pretend that mastodon.social is “Mastodon.”

Also the appearance of no political baggage, but that’s not actually true either.

are they really missing, or is the shoe just on the other foot? i've been trying Bluesky for a month or so and it indeed seems to just be regurgitated memes and low-effort insults. the only difference is it's from a liberal/Democrat POV. the place comes off as an echo chamber sorely lacking in diversity of opinion tbh. if you go against the grain you'll be added to blocklists, which people seem giddy to use as to curate their echo chamber. hell, for daring to criticize the Democratic party from the left i've found myself on numerous MAGA and far-right blocklists. maybe this will change in due time? that'd be swell.

Well I can understand where they're coming from. The discussions have become so polarised and so nasty.

What is happening a lot here in Holland now that the hard-right crowd are constantly spamming topics about totally unrelated issues with stuff like "There are only 2 genders". I don't mind them having an opinion (even though I strongly disagree), I just don't want it shoved in my face constantly and inappropriately. It's like they are so preoccupied with what's happening in other people's pants that they can't talk about anything else.

So yeah that is something I don't want to see in social media anymore and I avoid platforms that allow it. Like Xitter.

Nonetheless this is an issue that's still not fixed in bsky.

I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to see America politics because I don't care about the nothingburger posts that surrounds Trump.

There's a setting to blacklist certain words or topics. It does not work. I hope they fix it at some point, because I don't spend much time on there, and I'd like to.

I see quite a lot of non-tech people on Mastodon. Many are academics, but many aren't.

No, there are no instances, there are just caching servers called "relays" that are run by many different people.

You create the content on your device and then send it to many of these relays (usually 10-20) and other users pull the content from also 10-20 relays. So if one relay decides to block you, then people still get your content from other relays. If all relays decide to block you, then you can (quite easily) run your own relay and tell your friends to pull the data from it. You own your data and you can resend it to wherever you want (it's signed by your private key, so it's verifiably from you).

Because there are no instances. There are relays that you post to, and that people use to fetch notes from. But there are no “user accounts” on the relays. If the note is signed by your private key, it comes from you, regardless of how it came to me. It can be through a bunch of relays.

Relays can and do filter notes by pub key. To fight spam, and problematic content. But you as a user can always change the relay set that you post to. And, of course, host your own relay, which is pretty straightforward.

Yeah, probably. Nostr is quite hated by the Hacker News community from what I have observed. This is most likely because it's used by folks that are into freedom technologies that explicitly don't allow excluding any users from participating. And so it attracts people that are into bitcoin, Tor, cryptography, etc. "Crypto" is actually quite hated at Nostr and you get called out for bringing any stupid crypto coins. You are free to talk about anything though and the system can't block or exclude you, but people may mute you in their clients.

It’s not really crypto adjacent. It is full of Bitcoin maxis who vehemently hate crypto though.

Discovery is great, as long as you know exactly who you want to follow. Got it!

That’s not what people mean by discovery.

Their discovery is so bad that they were touting new discovery algorithms for account recommendations in some recent release. So much for "no algorithm".

Bluesky has 3.5M DAU.

Deceptive. While half the tech people I used to follow on Twitter moved to Mastodon, three quarters of them have either shifted to bsky or post to both via mirroring.

Have the non-tech people you used to follow on Twitter also migrated to Mastodon? What about the other half of the tech people, where did they go?

Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on Mastodon tbh.

User identities are not user data. Your identity is only lost if you used an identity provider that shut down. Your data is separately stored. You can, in effect, own your bluesky identity forever, even if every BS server shuts down, so long as DNS still exists and functions.

That's not actually true. If you host your data yourself with a PDS then everything continues to work. And your data is all stored in a big merkle tree so you can actually just back it up from the network and if bluesky shits itself you can upload it to your own PDS and continue as if nothing happened.

Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)

>Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it.

On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human bound time limits.

On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove them.

If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.

Simply put, there is too much information in the world for you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your media choices wisely.

depends on the trustworthiness of the source. at some point we have to trust something; could be our own selection process, but it can very well be the opinion of someone who you follow that seem genuine over X amount of time. The false positives are probably a necessary evil, humans will make mistakes, miss sarcasm, etc.

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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.

Believe it or not, I find most of my disagreement on social issues rather than technical topics on HN and I am a fairly conventional social democrat.

If Slashdot's system was so much better why has it declined so much?

Was it the hot grits ?

I say this as someone who still has an account over there with a lowish UID.

See, the thing is, I do not wish to hear from idiots. Life is too bloody short.

This is how normal in-person social interaction works too, by the way. If you’re in a pub and someone comes up and starts ranting at you about how the pizza restaurant basements are turning the frogs gay, you’re probably not going to engage them. And if they keep at it, they’ll probably get kicked out.

The internet is full of people who (a) insane, and (b) insane in a very boring, same-y way. Filtering these people out is _fine_. There is no moral obligation to listen to every ranting idiot who comes along.

"Better for you?"

Yes, absolutely.

"Better for discourse?"

Incredibly. You actually have conversations. You talk about topics. You replace all the meaningless arguing and yelling with actual conversation.

"Better for protecting your echo chamber from things that might challenge you?"

... The whole world is challenging right now.

It has been my entire life.

The only way to protect my echo chamber is to make the world better.

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...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07779

Is it cryptographically possible to give different keys to everyone so they can't be shared?

Or only if you re-encrypt the content for every key you hand out?

You can, but as that document makes clear, it is very complicated to move an account and to do it right.

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

In my (strongly held) opinion, the experience is better on BlueSky. Discovery on Mastodon was tedious work for me.