What can you tell me about Bluesky?

Chris Remington@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 66 points –

I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that's all I know about Bluesky.

So, what can you tell me about this project?

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Could Bluesky not just implement ActivityPub too? Is there a reason why they are not doing that?

They chose not to after researching options. Pretty sure they decides account portability was a key feature needed and AP doesn''t do this. As in taking your account and all your posts and data witj you to a new server. I assume there is a technical reason why this would be very difficult to add to AP/Mastodon otherwise they could have just added it themselves.

Yeah the not being able to fully move your account and all its history is one of the biggest shortcomings of AP for me. I hope they shore that up eventually.

100% agree, without it, the decentralization aspect is severely weakened

It's nothing to do with that, they made the AT protocol because is structured in a way that ensures that bluesky (the company) will always control the network. They wouldn't be able to keep control with ActivityPub, it's the same reason Threads will never implement it.

All the stuff about account portability is a distraction. Think about it: where would one move an account to anyway? Another BS node? Why? Unlike Mastodon instances there is no functional difference.

You clearly haven't read the docs

Here's a doc for ya: https://rys.io/en/167.html

This line is self contradicting

So the storage layer is “neutral”, accounts are “portable”. That to me means that node operators will have no agency in the system. Discoverability/search/recommendations are done in a separate layer, and the way the system seems to be designed (nodes have no say, they just provide the data) effectively places all the power with these “reach” algorithms.

3rd party feeds and recommendations and discovery already exists. They are also not dependent on the continued existence or openness of the bluesky servers. You can control your own experience and it's easy to find and switch between feeds. Having more subscribers to your feed doesn't make you more powerful in the context of network effects. If people stop looking your feed they'll dump it.

Also, node operators have full control of what they forward to clients. They can absolutely apply moderation filters, and this is one of the expected means for such nodes to market themselves to their communities - "we have default feeds and moderation which suits your community".

So it’s a winner-takes-all system that strongly avantages whoever starts building their dataset early and can throw as much money at it as possible.

Nonsense, the network uses relay servers which acts as open CDN servers and the firehose feed is open AND 3rd party hosted feed builders already exists (and they're open source so you can copy them), you don't need to waste duplicate work on building datasets. This network is cooperative. It has absolutely no winner-takes-all effects, it explicitly encourages division of labor and mix-and-matching multiple 3rd party services.

Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.

Then use web-DID which already is fully decentralized

Jack is not involved with bluesky anymore, he's in nostr land now. He doesn't have majority on the board and isn't influencing development.

There is no way to opt-out from “reach” algorithms indexing one’s posts, as far as I can see in the ATproto and BS documentation. So fash/harassers would be able to choose an algorithm that basically recommends targets to them.

Moderation tools like this is in the works, it's not complete yet. Mute/block filters already exists, and label services for moderation are being worked on

A whole lot of directly false nonsense and irrelevant arguments and ignorance of what the devs are working on