Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | TechCrunch

airportline@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 167 points –
Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | TechCrunch
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Fleeing from Twitter to Bluesky remains one of the dumbest, most myopic decisions that people have made in recent memory. "Oh, I'm sure a Dorsey-run and designed service won't turn out exactly like the last one did!"

Well it would certainly be a challenge to turn out worse than current twitter.

It wouldn't be a challenge at all. It's just earlier in its lifecycle.

Bluesky is pretty great so far, in may i will complete 1 year and I like a lot, made many friends.

Its perfect? Of course not...

How have you gone about making friends on the platform? I checked it out, but found it a bit isolating. Surely that's on me rather than the platform, so I'd like to hear of your experience.

I started following back everyone who followed me. and a crucial point of Bluesky is that you have to interact, otherwise no one knows you exist, they won't start interacting with you out of nowhere. Enter other people's conversations without fear (but with respect, of course) this helped me a lot to fit in. Looking for people with similar tastes is also a good tip, I talk a lot about football and video games.

Thanks, I'll keep all that in mind. It's something I'm hoping to get out of the Fediverse too. I just need to push myself to be more active, rather than just passively consuming.

Did my typical, set up an account to squat on my username so no one else gets it then signed back out to likely never sign in again…

Why this over Mastodon?

Depends on the kinds of accounts you follow. Mastodon is all technical users - so not many celebrities who aren't in technical fields.

that's the reason why I don't use Mastodon. there are a lot of tech and politics related things, and I am not tech savvy

When corporations inevitably arrive to the platform, we can use it to shame them into offering a decent service after they ignore our calls and emails.

Good billionaire owner who sold his stuff to evil one.

Put that descriptor in air finger quotes please: “good “

I thought this was the network for "bright people" ;-) They are really thinking to join.

I posted the same comment without joking a month ago. A more direct one. See its score: https://lemm.ee/comment/7775363

Yeah agreed. In his case though I was referring less to the fact he’s a billionaire (which is actually more relevant than what I was thinking about it) than that I used to think he was one of the “good ones” but then later learned to enough about him (but not much, still) to not be impressed anymore.

The level of hypocrisity at Europe is really beyond limits but the fact that there aren't insane level rich entities in Europe is really something worth bragging about.

It is not just about jack, what annoys me is people with minimum income thinks there are heroic riches who are acting against the order. That is evil PR in action.

It has some features Id love to see on ActivityPub like account migration between servers, and people are already working on bridges between the protocols so it will basically be able to federate, at least with mastodon. I was also skeptical but if they keep it open source and let it play nice with AP protocall I wont be mad at it. Sure I'd prefer them pushing AP further than doing their own thing but for whatever reason I'm willing to give more benefit of the doubt to them than a service like threads.

SMS verification?

Eeeeh… :-/

Does anybody remember when Twitter ran basically exclusively over SMS?

I remember. Getting blown up by texts from 40404 on my dumb phone all day. It was basically a glorified group text the way we used it. Which was both great and awful.

Whoa man, I totally forgot about that functionality. I looked it up to see if it was still supported but seems that they retired it in April 2020, with the exception of a few countries. Kind of crazy they kept it going that long given how obviously unsecure SMS is (which is the main reason Twitter gave at the time for why they were retiring it).

O yea when Twitter was cool and unique lolol

Unfortunate fact: Oppressive regimes and even billionaires in such regimes can basically get all of your SMS. No matter which brand, they will handover your data.

Is that the only way?

Yes. It's the second step in the sign-up process. And you can't see anything without signing up.

Woo another social media to ignore! How long before he sells this one to musk?

As a decentralized platform, Bluesky’s code is completely open source,

As long as a company is in control, being decentralized doesn't mean shit.

The literal elephant in the room is Mastodon, the open source, decentralized social network that’s been around since 2016, years before Bluesky existed. While the platforms share similar goals, they use different protocols, making it difficult for the platforms to work together.

Quick, someone link the xkcd

I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.

  • Decentralised
  • Low barrier to sign up
  • Not owned by a crazed billionaire
  • No ads
  • No popularity algorithm
  • Interesting features, like custom feeds and moderation lists

If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don't see why it can't take off.

Decentralised

[citation needed]

Well, that's the whole point of the whole thing. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which will be federated early this year. https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation

I know everyone likes to shit on all Social Media that isn't called Mastodon, but that doesn't mean Mastodon is the only option. I am on both (and Twitter a bit still too) but Bluesky is where I spend most of my time.

We're on Lemmy, where proprietary software is poison and companies are literally Hitler.

Theres a group of devs that have been working on a bridge between the protocols I found out about while digging for info about Bluesky.

5 more...

According to Similarweb the number of visitors has been going down recently, which might be part of the reason for Bluesky opening up to public sign-ups.

But I also posted my invite codes to a bunch of Discord servers a while ago and still nobody joined, so I question how much of an impact this will actually have.

I wasn't interested enough to seek out an invite but now that's its open I'll register an promptly forget to ever check again. Plus someone else already took the username "can". Who else would want that? lol

This is the best summary I could come up with:


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.

The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking.

“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.

This all sounds great, but of course, the question will inevitably arise: what if a bad actor creates a moderation service or a server that has tangibly harmful consequences?

This is more of a hands-off approach, which also relies on users to take advantage of Bluesky’s customizable moderation tools to determine what online safety means to them.

Graber couldn’t have possibly anticipated that plot twist, but a year before the acquisition, she just so happened to spin Bluesky out from Twitter and into its own public benefit corporation.


The original article contains 875 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Haven't been following Blue sky stuff at all. Any reason to use this over mastodon?

Celebrities, politicians and businesses will be more likely to show up on the platform, if that's your jam.

Ah gotcha. I'm kind of enjoying just hanging with regular people being regular on mastodon. Probably check out bluesky at some point.

Thanks for the info!

As an American you’re supposed to consider yourself a temporarily inconvenienced superstar millionaire, so maybe you should get over to there to hob nob with the rich foke.