I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.
I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.
C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.
Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!
I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.
1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common.
2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind.
3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent.
4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It's bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very "World Wide Web" in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered.
5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the "Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon" saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.
If they are truly open, it'll get bridged to the Fediverse the way people started bridging to Twitter (but were shut down because Twitter doesn't want to be open), and anything good about the protocols will be adopted whole or on part and subsumed.
Which to me makes it just stupid of them to start from scratch rather than starting with interop with the Fediverse and optionally making breaking changes and/or bridging themselves.
E.g. the ability to migrate data more easily is great, but also easily accommodated by a combination of adding a new URI scheme and provide rewriting proxies to federate with ActivityPub instances that don't support it.
It feels like a lot of NIH and desire to be in control that I feel are at odds with building an open ecosystem.
I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs.
It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.
I think the issue is partly technical, but mostly product, in that neither Mastodon nor it's servers are very obvious in usage, and finally its 'too decentralized'.
We don't need 'ultra decentralization' aka a different grocery store on every corner, nor do we want one single grocery store in the middle of the city, but rather just 'choice'.
Frankly it's like most things, we just want to avoid monopolization.
That said, a slightly different Mastodon configuration and a killer use case might enable it to rise aka business adoption.
The big thing is that there needs to be a path for users who don't care about the geeky shit to have a compelling experience with very little cognitive load at any step of the process. Us humans will gravitate to sub-optimal options if it offers less resistance... There's a reason the top 12 highest grossing US chains are fast food. BlueSky seems to offer a simple centralized service to those folks AND offer federation for folks who want to be more hands-on! I'm down.
As a designer and a long-time software developer, I see a TON of Dunning-Kruger Mt. Stupid comments about interface design, usability and what's reasonable to expect of users. Developers are naturally more willing to spend time futzing with social media technology because a) they have the domain expertise to reason about it comfortably, b) they have a high tolerance for high-touch software and take pride in their willingness to wrangle complicated and difficult interfaces, c) they care about the technical underpinnings, and d) because of all that, the space is likely to be populated by people who share their perspectives and interests.
If you take those things away, what incentive to users have to use the platform? I reckon that a lot of folks in the dev crowd don't naturally excel with the whole theory of mind thing, but if FOSS is going to produce tools useful to non-technologists, they should trust others that do. IMO the FOSS crowd desperately needs to embrace this cultural shift.
Yes totally but I don't think D-K is necessarily it but you've tapped into a big source.
Not only do most users 'not care' about stuff, it actually is not that important ... until it is.
Twitter is actually 'good enough' for the most part. I don't like it, but I use it and find it acceptable. It's a big thing to ask people to shift gears for no really apparent reason (aka 'Musk says nasty things and is unfair!').
So yes, that is a primary product less: it has to be super, super easy to use and understand. Maybe, maybe, you can find a funnel to get people a bit more up the path of understanding. Maybe.
> I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.
One thing regarding bluesky that is often overlooked, and is related to XMPP (Jabber), is that Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP is one of three board members, the others being Jack of Twitter fame and Jay Graber who is the CEO.
Hopefully, the combined experience of running a platform the founder himself consider a failure with the experience of inventing a open protocol still being used today, can create something cool.
But it's way too early to tell, as you say. One can only stand by and see where they end up. They certainly have interesting ideas, but the crux is always in the implementation.
TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network.
And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it. Jack and his cronies aren't actually any better than Musk is, they're just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world. I don't trust them.
This tells me that you don’t actually want what Twitter is (was?) good at.
Mastodon is clearly not a replacement for me. It’s a different type of community/service, one that doesn’t have much value for me. (Not to say it’s bad! I just don’t care for it, it doesn’t do something I want.)
Equally, Twitter wasn’t (and mostly still isn’t) terrible for everyone. Everyone gets to choose what it is! I am particular about who I follow, I unfollow quickly, and I care not for celebrities and people’s “personal brand”.
Twitter is an incredible resource, if you want it to be.
That said, it could clearly be better, and any replacement that prevents a single entity controlling everyone’s algorithmic feed or deciding who can post or what they can say is worth exploring.
No, i understand what Twitter is. I was using it as far back as 2009. I have a problem with recent pre-musk changes, such as putting posts from people you dont follow and often dont agree with into your feed to make people argue. If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.
And then there's Twitter turning itself into the arbiter of truth. Users were having blue checks revoked as a punitive measure, which means that it's not really about "verifying" somebody, it's just a stupid status symbol.
They have an AI that will automatically ban you on a whim if you talk about certain subjects; i was permanently banned for over a month for making a joke at the expense of anti-vaxxers before amoderator finally reviewed my case and removed the infraction from my account.
Their role in covering up the hunter Biden laptop leak is also disturbing. I don't even think there was anything noteworthy in the leak, but Twitter censoring something that might be embarrassing for a politician under the guise of combatting misinformation is a scandal unto itself.
These are all things that happened before Elon musk announced he was buying Twitter. It is absolutely a terrible, abusive platform and i cannot fathom why anybody would trust Jack Dorsey to run another social network.
> If you don't post iften enough, several times a day they will even send you notifications for posts that don't involve you and don't even come from people you follow.
I just checked my notifications - of the last ~100, over the last week or so, there's not a single one that isn't directly related to me. I've only posted one tweet in that week.
Refreshing to hear someone criticize Twitter for pre-Musk censorship and discourse-destroying policies, which indeed go right to Dorsey’s front door.
Most current anti-Twitter sentiment I see is from people who hate Elon Musk and want to see him fail. Limited principal discussion about what features a communication platform/protocol must have to best enable knowledge sharing and discourse.
I'm especially interested in what their new protocol offers that ActivityPub doesn't. There are more protocols than just ActivityPub, like Zot6 which focuses a lot more on nomadic identity than ActivityPub does. I'd love to know what it is that makes BlueSky's protocol better and therefore worth adding. Because if it doesn't do anything that other protocols already do, then what's the point?
As someone who's watched some of this but has little personal interest, the differentiation seems to be that Bluesky has a more compelling product on top of its decentralized protocol, judging by the reaction to it by 'personalities' from various domains.
If you want nomadic identity, a tiny tweak to expect ActivityPub instances to support a distributed content addressable URI scheme (optionally via proxies) is almost all that is needed, so if there turns out to be a lot of demand for it, it'll get added.
Maybe some folks like yourself thought Twitter was terrible before, but plenty of people were happy enough until certain changes by Musk. Mastodon itself had a large growth recently as people left Twitter in response.
I had an automated bot running for a long time on Twitter that I was happy with, until recently when API access was cut off. Now I'm looking for a new platform for my bot to run on as a direct result of recent controversial policy change. Maybe it will be Mastodon or Bluesky, or maybe something else. I think I prefer something more similar to how Twitter was than Mastodon currently is for my needs.
For an automated bot making announcement-like posts, a Twitter page is simply a web page with subscriptions for those having a Twitter account: you naturally assume everybody has a Twitter account and checks it regularly, or put more negatively, you ignore anyone not on Twitter.
Mastodon would serve exactly the same purpose with the set of people being "ignored" being much larger.
Email newsletter services would pretty much include everyone (on the internet, at least).
> I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark.
I remember writing a tutorial on how to connect your League of Legends chat of all things to Pidgin, once upon a time. I doubt it still works, Riot's completely remade their client since then....but, yeah, those days were certainly nice.
> In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by special guest Erin Kissane and long-time acquaintances of the show Tim Bray and Steve Klabnik.
+1 this. I'm very much hoping they'll stick to the protocol because it seems very well thought out and designed as a social protocol. I see this as a Deno situation where the runtime is free and open and will always be that way, but they build products upon it. That way everyone benefits from a good thing.
The most important property of any-to-any publishing is not to (algorithmically or otherwise) turn any-to-any into some-to-many by creating celebrities and boosting the same content to everyone.
I think this is something TikTok (for all their issues) probably got more right than others.
There’s a lot further to go before we perfect this, but Nostr, Bluesky, et al. are doing at least something right.
People prefer to receive information that other people get (ie from popular people and large outlets), so algorithmic prioritization of existing popular brands/people is literally just giving (most) readers what they want.
Sites that do this will outcompete sites that do not.
Decentralized systems do provide an escape hatch, however, so that's good and useful for the minority of users that seek out niches or deep cuts.
I think this is a good take that I don't need to add much to, to be honest.
Maybe this doesn't add as much to the discussion as vehement agreement or disagreement might to the curious HN reader, but I do really personally appreciate it. <3 :)
Holy moly, you just made my day. I will have to give it a shot. I thought that once all the walled gardens developed their own protocols that it was dead in the water!
All the walled gardens supported in the old days of Pidgin were reverse engineered, same goes for the modern walled gardens. The tools for reverse engineering of protocols (like Wireshark) have only gotten better since then.
Please note that Pidgin is still GTK2 but there is a GTK4 version in the works that has a more modern interface. I think they welcome donations to make that go more quickly.
If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.
However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.
I don't understand why they wouldn't implement ActivityPub-federation. Instead of strengthening the best federated social network, they chose to undermine it. Why?
on bluesky (sorry) the devs have been super active and responsive and eager to explain their approach. they have talked about this specific choice at length - that after an extensive ecosystem review and lots of thought, it seemed like a different architecture had a better chance of working at scale. I hope they find the time to explain this more publicly but it’s definitely a decision they didn’t make lightly.
More generally, I have a ton of respect for the standardization process and for the amount of (mostly volunteer!) engineering over the years that had gone into fediverse, but it’s been so long and growth has been so slow that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a new project to try something different.
Lol, this is HN. Comments are often incredibly negative, and frequently enough - wrong or not quite right, yet arrogant &/ opinionated etc.
Others taught me long ago to try to keep something of a 'critical eye' turned on whenever I'm reading news etc. I try not to judge simply for the sake of judging, nor let past impressions completely overwhelm info right in front of me, but having some sort of basic impression / expectation of people, journals, newspapers, websites, etc. is helpful in avoiding some time wastage and filling my mind up with (more) utter nonsense.
I end up disagreeing with / doubting many comments on HN, yet still get a LOT out of reading even those comments - just in the sense of sort of the 'zeitgeist' and what sorts of BS I'm likely to come upon elsewhere.
A worse Twitter? The amount of blatant racism, bigotry, and calls for violence have exploded in the past couple of months. These people all buy blue checks so they get amplified. It's insane. My bluesky invite cannot come soon enough.
Given IQ statistics throw a pretty big spanner in the works of white supremacists by showing them that Ashkenazi Jews are the top of the average list, it's pretty hard to see how they're racist.
>Last time Jack Dorsey was in charge of Twitter, they did essentially nothing about CSAM.
I am going to assume you have no evidence Twitter's new management is more active in combating child porn. You can, I'm sure, find evidence of them claiming they're taking a stand, but what they've actually done is gut the safety and moderation teams.
The rise of hateful speech, on the other hand, is quite clear. We have seen a massive, sustained uptick in racist posts since the site was taken over. We see an increase in accounts associated with terrorists organizations like ISIS, many of them "verified" and impersonating famous people. We have seen an increase in postings from QAnon followers, many with verified accounts. We have seen and measured increases in violent speech across the board. I would classify all these things as "actual terrible stuff", as would any decent person.
Twitter is every bit as censored as it ever has been. It regularly bans people for criticizing Twitter policy; blocks, throttles, and downranks competitors; downranks left-wing organizations and news sources; and (pathetically) requires Felon's posts to always be ranked highly. Twitter is still censored, just by a manchild dictator rather than the hard work of fallible people.
Not necessarily, but most likely. I have never met a person in the wild who wanted to talk about IQ statistics without using them as a pseudo-scientific fig leaf to justify genocide. I've been on the Internet; I've played this game.
And, let me guess, next you'll say there's no way such you're racist because these statistics show Asian and Jewish people have higher IQ than white people.
> And, let me guess, next you'll say there's no way such you're racist because these statistics show Asian and Jewish people have higher IQ than white people.
I hope you didn't cheat and look at the sibling comment :P, but indeed it is predictable.
> I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I'm unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.
Biggest difference that I noticed is in Bkueaky you identity is not tied to the site you signed up at.
Mastodon has a huge flaw in that your identity is not stable. Like email your identity is tied to your provider, and if you change providers you have to change your identity, and all your contacts have to update their addresses boom so to speak.
In Bluesky your identity is stable, with some caveats. It's easy to "bring your own domain" without having to host your own service provider.
I lot of people hate themselves and the world and complain about everything. I wouldn't worry too much about what the HN unimind thinks about something.
> The fact that they even take up visual space is an annoyance
Yes, we all have things other HN users are interested in that we aren’t. That’s a consequence of participating in a community, as distinct from a hivemind.
Most links on HN don't interest me, and they don't bother me either, but the shilling for Bluesky has been quite apparent lately. If anything, their presence is more indicative of a hivemind than my eagerness for them to go away.
Your proposal that I must want every link on HN to be something I am interested in is obviously a bad faith argument. Later.
I think the uptick of blue sky posts is directly tied to a bunch of techies/journos getting their invites and are excited for a possible Twitter alternative. But I’ve also seen articles talk about the issues with bluesky as well (hell threads, bunch of butts, public block lists, s3 domain thing). Exciting times.
This didn't happen, but more importantly Twitter was far more proactive about resisting law enforcement requests for private info than other social media companies, which is the actual thing to be worried about.
Current Twitter ownership is allowing India's government to censor things worldwide and is obviously compromised in China as well.
some quick thoughts/notes (I am on the bluesky team, but this isn't an official policy statement):
- content on bluesky is public, but we have not set expectations/comms around that well yet, and this dump may be a surprise to some existing accounts. where exactly bluesky falls on the spectrum from "congressional register (immutable)" to "public web" to "public IRC or discord room" to "private signal group" is still being worked out, but probably closest to "public web"
- the protocol supports both "deletions" (retaining history), and "purge" (aka "rebase") to remove all not-current content. this isn't exposed via UI yet and accounts have not had the chance to purge old deletions
- the federation protocol and unified firehose should make it possible for third parties to maintain a live mirror of the entire corpus. importantly, it will be easy (or at least "easier") to respect intents w/r/t deletions when done this way, compared to dumps
- obviously neither "deletion" nor "purge" can perfectly remove content from 3rd party dumps and infra, or from hostile parties. but it does signal user intent clearly, and we expect as a norm that third parties will respect that intent. ADS-B, robots.txt, CC licensing are related to these norms, though all unique. right-to-be-forgotten, archiving, re-use licensing, use in ML training, commercial/non-profit reuse, search indexing, etc, are all on our radar
- blobs/images are not included in this corpus
- this specific corpus does not (I assume) include our important "label" moderation metadata. at least for our (Bluesky) core moderation decisions, that information will be public
- private/group content is not yet part of protocol. eg, no built-in mechanism for DMs or follower-only posts. we will probably do those eventually, but it will be basically a whole separate protocol, not a bolt-on to existing stuff. wildly different privacy/security concerns with non-public content
- there are some other cool projects, like https://bsky.jazco.dev/, working with the full social graph, pulled via public API
As a team member, one request that I do have is that don't make Clubhouse's mistake. Someone once told me that Clubhouse was like a house party, where your behavior reflected on who invited you. So it kept the initial community quality high.
The minute Clubhouse removed that invite-only policy, the community died very quickly and everything was replaced by the worst sludge imaginable.
I think you should keep the invite structure, and increase the number of invites to positive users/communities (as you already do!). And use the graph that naturally forms to inform content moderation.
Social shame is a strong motivator that hasn't been properly deployed by a platform yet (mobs on twitter don't count). What I'm thinking about is that if someone you invited directly does something horrible like, posts slurs to a user, then the inviter should also get a notice that their invitee was a horrible human being. And if this inviter's invites end up being toxic people, then it may be a good idea to prune that branch of the tree.
This structure will limit growth, necessarily, but it will also give you time to solidify a new kind of structure and a new kind of experiment in social media.
I think it is possible to have a high-quality social network that scales.
Also, please for the love of god, I want to get my mom to use the platform, can you make sure that stuff doesn't break containment?
> where your behavior reflected on who invited you
Ages ago, I suggested that slashdot (or successor) adopt a mafia-style system of vouching. So that members police their own.
I invite you to slashdot, so your reputation (karma, whatever) impacts my own. In a way, you become my responsibility. To protect my own rep, I may have to kick you off the system.
If you in turn invite others, they also factor into my rep. Kicking you off would also kick off all your invites. And so on.
Not perfect. Brings the problems of social solutions too.
Popularity contests, smooching, people & groups ostracized for status game reasons, other forms of social bullying and so on.
It’s maybe great for a frat, but it will struggle for exploring the fallow lands close to controversial topics.
This happens to be where a lot of the really important stuff happens, the explorations that lead to growth.
You can’t solve this by simple weighting. Most novel true and important things are only realized by a tiny minoroty. And if they happen to be unpopular, forget about it.
If the purpose of your social network is to be actually useful for the world, this is an extremely important feature
Perfect wasn't the right word to use, but in the age of LLMs, deep fake images, video, and voice; No one should take to heart anything they see on these screens.
Don't take this the wrong way, I have no reason to believe that you're a real person and not a fun contrarian bot. And you to myself as well. :)
In either case, our wetware isn't suited for social interactions at this scale. I think small, invite only, social rings are much better than what we have now. Yeah, people are going to play silly games, but we won't see a solution to that for a very long time.
As for the people who are eager to explore the edges of controversial ideas; they should be aware of how to discern a group that values progression through challenge over one that demands consensus, and steer clear of the latter.
And to your final point about being useful to the world, it would be better to strive to build a system useful to just your loved ones and local community. Plenty of people exhaust themselves over words on a screen from fake people on the other side of the planet. We have enough ancient and contemporary text from philosophers and religious leaders to remind us that people, specifically the people physically around us, matter more than anything. But of course, there's no money to be made with IT cookbooks, so we don't talk about them.
It's disappointing to hear that follower-only/circles (whitelisted viewers) posts are basically incompatible with the current protocol. I'd hoped something could be done where the post content was encrypted in such a way that only specific authenticated users could decrypt it, or something along those lines
It doesn't sound too hard to layer on top of AT Proto. You already have cryptographic building blocks so you can encrypt content for specific users, I'd guess the only thing that is missing having something like that is the actual UI.
But I haven't done a deep-dive into the protocol, just a surface glance so far.
How do you intend to prevent someone from manipulating their mirror? Are users signing their messages before publishing to a data server? It is unclear from the documentation.
all public account content is in a "repo", commits to the repo are signed, and the identity resolution mechanism gives anybody the current/active signing key.
the most direct analogy is to signed git commits. this is an intentional design decision compared to signing individual messages/posts/etc. A "proof" for a single record in the repo is the commit, the record, and the chain of merkle tree nodes connecting the two.
From what I can tell after digging into the code, the server is responsible for signing everything. I was really hoping that users would have more control in regards to this. I have a similar concern, what prevents the server from publishing without the users consent?
Also, I keep seeing discussion about being able to move identities to a new server, but to do that, you need to update your corresponding DID Document -- currently published to https://plc.directory/. Again, that has to be done with the sigining key. What if a server refuses? Is the user stuck and forced to recreate the account/history somewhere else?
There are two keys that can be used for DID updates. One is the signing key that the publishing server may also control, one one is the recovery key. If a content server goes rogue, the recovery key can be used within 72 hours to retroactive undo changes made to the DID (if the server did that).
If the server just maliciously messed with your data repository, you just use the recovery key. If the malicious content server did not try to rotate the recovery key, you can just use it to reset the signing key, regardless of if the content server rotated it. If it did malicious try to rotate the recovery key, as long as you notice within 72 hours, you can fork a new DID history from some state that was current within the last 72 hours that has your old recovery key.
Either way, you use the recovery key to rotate the signing key, to something you control. Now, you can repoint your DID to a new content server, upload your unadulterated post history to it.
Also, the core of the protocol does not strictly require that the content server have your publishing keys. In theory a client can create new posts, sign them and upload them. This will mean that certain API methods that exist that do things like add a new post won't work, which is theoretically fine if you only ever want to post from fully trusted clients that could be given access to your signing key, create a new commit, and upload it.
Also it is not yet clear if all servers will allow such usage. In theory a content server could refuse to host the data repositories for users if it lacks the signing key for the user.
Footnote: These content servers are formally called Personal Data Servers. I used content servers throughout this post to be clear that I am not talking about plc.directory or other such ancillary servers.
On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it would be trivial to create a Bluesky app view that provides this inverted index. And some people would be inclined to use the list of people who block them as a "target list" of people whose views differ from them, to share with their networks as prospects for targeted harassment that may even cross into real-life violence. (The fact that critics of the infamous Ki*f*ms forum have been swatted - and that I am even now reticent to type the full name - is just the tip of the iceberg of potential dangers here.)
I hope that Bluesky comes up with a better mechanism here - it's tough to do in a federated system, but research like https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1577.pdf may be helpful.
Maybe it'd be better to just not have any blocking/muting built into such a system at all.
If User A doesn't want to see posts from User B, that's fine. User A can have his client filter them out locally, prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed. Nobody else has to know this is happening.
I don't think that User A should be permitted to prevent User B from replying to User A's posts, which in turn prevents User C (or all other users) from discovering what User B thinks about whatever User A posted.
User A trying to prevent his otherwise-public posts from being visible to User B seems pointless to me, as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked, or ask somebody else who hasn't been blocked to screenshot it, or use some other way around it.
The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A.
If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!
> The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A.
Realistically, there is no way to prevent this.
Even if you prevent B from interacting with A via the platform itself, they can always just take a screenshot and post that. Or copy-paste the text. Or numerous other ways.
On twitter if a profile is locked (cannot be viewed publicly and followers must be approved) it’s very difficult for a blocked user to ever see a post. Even for a public profile if someone is blocked they can’t use the normal QT option and they can’t reply, which creates much more friction for follow on abuse.
> On twitter if a profile is locked (cannot be viewed publicly and followers must be approved) it’s very difficult for a blocked user to ever see a post.
It's really not. Incognito window usually work, or something like nitter. Not to mention all the various archives of public tweets.
> Even for a public profile if someone is blocked they can’t use the normal QT option and they can’t reply, which creates much more friction for follow on abuse.
Yes, more friction, but if someone really wants to, instead of quoting, they just take a screenshot of the tweet and posts that instead.
> Incognito window usually work, or something like nitter
They won't if the profile is locked. It means you have to be logged in to check you aren't on their blocklist (or maybe even it's equivalent to account being private - I'm not up to date on Twitter).
Realistically 99% of the harassment is stopped by such feature, humans are foul and lazy creatures, most harassment happens because it's really easy to do it, when you create such bumps it stops most of it, if you want to stop it 100% that's another discussion worth having but by no means a good argument against such blocking.
I always thought it was funny that you can run a cross a tweet that’s hidden to you because the author blocked you, but that tweet is of course visible when you’re logged out.
The solution is unique and quite simple: require A to explicitly list the people they want to share with. It is the public broadcasting which is the root cause of this problem.
Accounts with big following would not want to do this as they want max reach. In twitter, you block and in blue sky you block, the blocked user knows right away in both cases. No need for a solution
Federation is the only viable choice unless you want to submit to a central power. If you want strong safety, you shouldn't be broadcasting publicly into the aether.
Right I’m saying I don’t particularly care about the governance structure of the protocol underlying my social media network. A centralized network run by a nonprofit or a b-corp and a relatively open API sounds great to me.
User safety is a dealbreaker though. Pretty sure I’m not alone.
What nonprofit do you trust to run such a thing? When their employees receive targeted harassment from political vigilantes, what do you think is going to happen? When the nonprofit board is stacked with Musk or Trump acolytes, what do you think is going to happen?
Media organizations are hugely vulnerable targets and they — nonprofit or commercial — are not proving resilient to outside pressure and influence. Decentralization is the only sustainable way forward if you want diversity in social media.
Decentralization cannot possibly increase diversity if it doesn't provide strong user safety measures. And decentralization makes that infamously hard problem much harder. I think you would end up compromising on one or the other.
>Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol.
The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features.
For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.
I like Mastodon, but "too complicated" is a legitimate concern and maybe undersells it. It's hard to use and puts a lot of burden on the users. Also seems like it's hard on admins, who have to deal with bad actors on their own server as well as constantly re-evaluate the volume of bad actors on servers they federate with.
As a user I don't want to deal with too much abuse but I also don't want to have to worry about my server not being able to connect to my friend's server. These goals seem like they're at odds. I could see it working if most users coalesce around a single server or a small network of servers with similar rules.
It's so much easier to build this into the app (which is what you're saying) rather than try to solve this at the proto level, I'm honestly surprised they even tried to include it into the protocol.
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. There's a really large trans community active on Bluesky right now, and they've been extremely vocal about what's important to them, with blocking being the thing demanded the loudest (butts being #2).
The dev team blew up their schedule to deliver blocking because of this.
I’m not sure any of that is accurate. According to The Verge, they added blocking earlier than they wanted to because Matt Yglesias was getting brigaded for his anti-trans views.
I’m on Bluesky, it’s what I’ve seen. Lots of folks from the trans communities there advocated strongly for the protection of blocking, saying muting didn’t go far enough (I disagreed but nobody cared).
Federation is great when properly applied. Email is an example of federation done right. But federated social media is a mistake. Not because it is federated, but because all social media is a mistake.
SMTP by itself has no authentication and we had to add crap on top of it like SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Don't have it? Oops, sorry, to spam it goes. Oh and don't forget about a reverse DNS record for your IP address with a correct domain, otherwise some mail servers will deny you. Want other mailservers to send you emails via TLS? Well, there is DANE, but that uses DNSSEC so Gmail doesn't support it. MTA-STS exists, but it's kinda silly and was made just for people that don't want DNSSEC for some reason, but at least Gmail supports it. For some reason there is also TLS-RPT for reporting about TLS use, so mail servers will send you emails that they used TLS, yay. Want your email address to have a picture? There is BIMI, but some mail servers won't display it if you don't pay few thousand dollars a year for some special certificate. Oh and it needs to be a pretty small SVG.
Oops, your email still went to spam? Maybe your IP is on some obscure blacklist for no god damn reason? Or Outlook just randomly decided to ban your IP, but will offer you to unban it automatically by filling some weird form? Or maybe Gmail decided to randomly put your reply email to spam to someone that emailed you first?
Want to retrieve your mailbox? Oh, do you want IMAP or POP? Obviously you don't want POP, you want IMAP, but you remembered that there is this "new" standard JMAP that is saner than IMAP. Oh what's that? Nobody supports it? Oh well.
I pay Fastmail to deal with the actual hosting but I own my domain so I can go to any other provider if I want. I have never had trouble sending or receiving email. Seems to be working pretty well.
Since some clients pull images from Gravatar, it's advisable to add an image to your Gravatar account and display it instead. While not a universal solution like BIMI, this is still an acceptable option where feasible.
Never heard of clients using Gravatar, but then that's relying on a centralised service. It further proves my point that email is not a good example of "federation done right".
There's no shortage of social media that offer "user safety" (ie; arbitrary censorship, unaccountable mods, enforced thought bubbles).
Internet without the training wheels should at least be an option, for those of us who have thick enough skin to dismiss the stuff we don't like without needing a self appointed authority figure to decide for us.
I generally find my viewpoint aligned with Mike on most issues, however this is where my opinion starts to diverge:
> “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.”
> That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech.
People who use slurs are absolute buffoons, and I have no interest in exposing myself to that sort of garbage (so I choose not to go to spaces where it's prevalent), however once there is a precedent for acceptable/unacceptable speech, and a mechanism where that can be enforced, it's inevitable that the definitions expand over time to things that cause advertisers to get squeamish. The paragraph references that very example.
The end result is that anything that could be an idea exchange becomes part of a monoculture of corporate controlled platforms with fairly consistent bounds on acceptable speech. This gives a small group of organisations outsized influence over public discourse, and the consequences of that are significant enough that it's worth exploring it in depth.
I want to be able to access diverse viewpoints, and to engage or ignore as I see fit. I'm suspicious of anyone who would want to make those decisions for me.
There is also a phenomenon where speech outside these bounds prompts people to themselves call for controls and limits to be put in place. I find that very concerning on a societal scale. It works in the interests of those who want to control speech.
Having outlets for fringe thoughts is a pressure release valve for the global conversation, and I worry that sanitising the whole thing will radicalise the people who are collecting in what few low touch spaces there are left.
“Censorship” is popular because it works better than the alternatives. The unfiltered internet is an endless stream of spam and junk and crypto scams. Few people want every message sent to them to land in their inbox.
> User A can have his client filter them out locally
We've been trying that with email and spam for the last 3 decades and I've got to tell you the results are not good.
> prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed.
A has to download the harassment from B just to then filter it locally? Seems like you're putting the onus on A here to do the work. What happens if B sends enough to DOS A's link? Or sends CSAM and now A is committing a crime just by downloading the content?
> as User B could log out, or use another account that hasn't been blocked
Which increases the friction on B if they want to harass A - this is good! We want to make harassment as friction-full as possible!
Aren't we talking about blocking and muting known user handles? This is easy, the spam problem would be identifying which handles to block.
> What happens if B sends enough to DOS A's link? Or sends CSAM and now A is committing a crime just by downloading the content?
What happens if B does the same before A had a chance to block them? And why would A's client download the content after reading that B published it from the metadata?
> Which increases the friction on B if they want to harass A
True, but I'm afraid we already know from Twitter that B will do it anyway, aided by either fast user switching or a Tweetdeck-like interface.
> Aren't we talking about blocking and muting known user handles?
This is the same as blocking known spam domains and IP blocks in email. They just switch to a new one. Which is best dealt with at the remote end since the server has a better chance of being able to identify new accounts which are related to blocked ones - Instagram even suggests this for you when you block someone: "...and any future accounts they may create". Having to do this in A's client is much more difficult because it lacks the information that would be useful.
> What happens if B does the same before A had a chance to block them?
It works pretty well on email. When I mark a user as spam or set up a filter rule, all of their content goes direct to spam or even deleted if I want. Doesn't bother me at all.
Email has also dealt with the spam issue mostly. If you blast me with too many emails, you get put on a spammer blacklist and servers will just drop the content without delivering it. It also isn't a crime to be unwillingly sent illegal content which you immediately delete.
Email has not solved the spam issue. I regularly get obvious spam email in my inbox, and legit mail still goes in the junk folder from time to time – with gmail. Plus, the automated spam filtering systems make it practically impossible to host your own e-mail, and any self-hosted email will have even worse issues with inbound spam than gmail does.
Spam is at the core of what makes email a terrible example of a federated system, along with absolutely terrible client compatibility issues.
That's irrelevant, automated blocking is a different discussion. This is about if it matters that the content hit your server or client and then was deleted because you had the user blocked, or if it's better to have a centralized system where the blocked users messages never make it to your client.
From the users perspective I can't really see any difference here.
And from a users's perspective, spam makes it through and legit messages end up in spam and the whole email system is more or less centralised due to attempts at combatting the issue. Those are all user facing issues.
Your ideas for client-side blocking in a federated system
may be okay, I don't know. I'm objecting to the "Email has dealt with the spam issue mostly" thing; it absolutely has not.
> the whole email system is more or less centralised due to attempts at combatting the issue
Do the big email providers even attempt to combat spam? I got an email from booking.com yesterday that literally contains the text "This message is an advertisement." From what I can tell, Gmail hasn't maintained their spam filters in at least a decade.
Then I, and no doubt many others, would love the disagreers to document their setups which have defeated spam because it is still a daily problem round these parts.
If the platform is pseudonymous and allows individuals to create multiple identities, such that it's trivial for those you block to view your posts from a different identity, or even by not logging in at all, then "blocking" isn't really blocking anybody except the lazy and the ignorant.
In fact, since most users don't think it through this far, even providing such a fake "block" function is inherently deceptive and user-hostile.
there's no reason you can't filter privately in the client as well, if you have a client that wants to prioritize privacy. but blocking/muting seems like a reasonable thing to include in the protocol, for clients that are prioritizing resources and not ingesting more posts than they need to and as a signal for algorithms to determine users who are frequently blocked or muted.
for somebody like myself, i'm just some dude nobody cares about. my twitter blocklist was major public figures who i didn't want to see retweets of in my feed. donald trump wasn't going to get angry at me because i blocked him, it's fine if that's included in some public list.
(Saying this as an excited bluesky user and someone who really really hopes all of this succeeds long-term)
I think possibly their biggest challenge ahead will be making parts of it non-public. Private mutes/blocks, having some analogue of Circles for whitelisting post viewers, etc.
Having a truly open and public database - especially once signups no longer require invite codes - is going to mean a cambrian explosion of tools and clients the likes of which we've never seen before in social media (which is already sorta happening even with closed signups). But that might include malicious apps that take advantage of that same openness to stalk, spam, and harass (especially given it's coinciding with a huge leap in AI technology). It might be AT Protocol's biggest test.
I'm writing a fairly basic social media app, right now.
The target demographic is very security/privacy-sensitive, so we have discussions about stuff like this, all the time.
If you block someone, they have no idea, except that you disappear from their radar. Even that, only came about, after a long discussion. Before, blocking someone simply meant that we could not see them, but they could see us.
My location is something that I can force off (meaning that no one can find me in location searches). Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square.
All visibility/security is enforced at the server. If possible, in SQL, so it never even makes it into the server code. Having API access buys you nothing.
Oh, sure, but it would take a while. The system is not Fort Knox. If someone wants to find one of the members that badly, then there are actually easier ways, outside of the system.
If we decide that it is a concern, I already know how I'd deal with it. I would add a "governor," to slow the process down. Depending on how the location is updated, that could be enough to render it worthless. People can't even see the "fuzzed" locations, unless they are registered members of the community. The locator would have to go through a registered account, and those don't come too easily.
However, if someone is that concerned, they would either hide their location entirely, or not join the community. The app is all about people finding each other.
The standard solution for dating apps is to snap the location to the nearest x kilometer grid point, so that you are losing information rather than simply adding noise
Just an update: I did a 1Km "snap" to the original location (I basically apply a weighted round to the initial ll), and apply the "fuzz" over that.
I'm sure a dedicated geek could still figure out how to hack it, but our target demographic, despite clamoring for privacy, tends to do Facebook "checkins" all the time.
Of course you have an idea who blocked, in twitter if you block someone they can’t see your content when you visit their profile. The mute on the other hand just filters from timeline
It's a tough line to walk. On one hand, if you participate in a system where almost everything is inherently public (the web/internet, since anyone can screenshot anything and publish wherever they want), it's hardly unexpected that information that was once public, can remain public forever.
On the other hand, people have some sort of expectation that the data they publicly post online to remain in some sort of semi-private state. Bluesky app might invite only for now, but the underlying protocol and technology makes everything very public, forever, and makes it trivial to cache locally (for good or bad purposes).
There's a vast difference between "public" and "actively surfaced." Indeed, blocking someone on Twitter would not prevent them from finding your public profile in an incognito window and seeing your posts - it would simply prevent your posts from being easily and automatically accessible to them in their feed. In practice, this tends to reduce conflict. My concern with Bluesky is that it makes it very possible for tools to make block information easily and automatically accessible - in fact, it would allow a bad actor to create a service that shows a feed of just content from people who want to block you from seeing it. That's a recipe for disaster.
I think that anyone can see who-blocked-who is the bigger issue, because that's usually not discoverable and allows a) a lot more large-scale analysis and b) when it comes to "celebrities" of various kinds, their "fanbase" is quite likely a bigger source of harassment etc overall.
I think one of the changes they're trying to push through is that since you can't really block someone from viewing your content, if they want to, they're turning it around a bit.
So don't think of blocks as "You won't be able to see my content" but more like "I won't have to see anything of you anymore, and you can't interact with me", which is more accurate on how blocks actually works, even if platforms tell you otherwise.
The blocked user would know most of the time if they were active in viewing the account that blocked. It’s not a problem, or that they’d eventually know.
isn't the whole point of making this a decentralized protocol to be able to have nuanced access policies that you can trust are actually enforced? if I'm participating in this protocol and someone requests my blocklist shouldn't that request get routed to my node which would respond according to my preferences which might be some choice like ignore them, answer them, lie to them, ask me, etc. depending if the request came from a contact, stranger, friend, foe, corporation, or whatever?
I think it's useful to have different networks with different rules - that way, we learn about what works and what doesn't. Twitter still has the behaviour you discuss here with people screenshotting pages showing someone blocked them, and publicising them.
I'd like a social network that's much more public, to compare it's results with twitter, etc. I'm thinking non-anonymous identities and fully public records of votes, etc.
Don't know how much it is wort, but also GDPR applies. So you need a legal basis for processing (at least data from EU citizens). That could well be journalism or scientific research, but for anything else it probably should be compatible with the expectation of the users. Fines have been typically rare and low for 'illegal' processing of twitter data. However, also blue sky and any other federating entity could face a legal risk if they do not protect that data reasonably against misuse.
What are the advantages of ATProto over ActivityPub? I don't get it, if you want to make a decentralized social network why not go with the standardized, working, protocol? What does ATProto offer over ActivityPub?
Nothing about the architecture of the protocol itself? Or better account migration or improved design of name conventions, or improved server performance?
Bluesky is absurd in both its small village feel and the breadth of people who post there and you can interact with. It's the same vibe as very early clubhouse. Broke artists next to philanthropists.
It's so predictable that it's frustrating to see people who should know better falling for it. Of course it's a fresh feel without the trolls. It's not open to all yet, so of course it is.
I don't know why they expect it to turn out any differently, it's hard to take this tool seriously.
Facebook was fresh once too. It was invite only for elite universities so everyone had roughly the same expectations for where lines were (they were not in acceptable places, but homogeneity helps with that).
How about using a tree-like structure to track who invited whom to the platform. Offer a generous yet limited number of invites to users, potentially adjusting this amount based on their positive interactions within the network. Permanently ban accounts that violate the rules, and if the new accounts a user invites keep getting banned (automatically) investigate whether that user is using multiple accounts, which would also be against the rules.
I'm sure deciding where to draw the line and clearly defining rules, and then enforcing them is a complex task (same as in public policy or international relations) inherent to any social network, and it is unlikely that an optimal solution exists considering the difference of opinions. However, could this type of rule help mitigate the issues mentioned?
It's funny to see people advocate for a classist system of nobility hundreds of years later. Please, tell us more about how you'd like to restrict a social network to those who are, as they say, "well bred".
There was a post here about a year ago that summarizes this pretty well[1]; I've honestly gone back to read it a few times for my own projects as it offers some good perspective and framing.
> My take is, if a community is constrained by quality (eg moderation, self-selecting invite-only etc) then the only way it grows is by lowering the threshold. Inevitably that means lower quality content.
To some extent, more people can make up for it. Eg if I go from 10 excellent artists to 1000 good ones, chances are that the top 10% artwork created actually gets better.
> But eventually if you grow by lowering quality, then, well, quality drops.
> I suppose for very small societies, they may be limited by discoverability/cliquiness and not quality, so their growth doesn’t mesh with quality and so they could also get better with size.
> Note, “quality” doesn’t have to mean good/bad but also just “property”. When Facebook started, it was for kids from elite schools. It then gradually diluted that by lowering that particular bar. Then it was for kids from all schools. Then young people. Then their parents too. Clearly, it’s far from dying in absolute terms, but it’s certainly no longer what it initially was. To many initial users, it’s as good as dead though.
My attempt at a solution is to keep it in request-access beta and do targeted advertising only at people who share interests with high-quality subset(s) of discussion on the site, so the new users usually see and can learn what high quality discussion looks like on the site even if all areas aren't mature.
As the site matures you can naturally let more people in until a quite open beta, then full release trying to never take on more than say 10% of the daily active users in any given section/hashtag-cloud per year.
This is my “X can restrict who they deal with” (where X is school or church or business or group or whatever) “but the DMV and the police have to deal with everyone” rule.
Last time I saw bsky on HN a maintainer shared a skip-waitlist invitation code ('anyone on HN is probably better behaved than some of the trolls we've dealt with', or something to that effect) - which was unfortunately dead by the time I found it। Any chance of an encore? Or I am on the waitlist: something I don't recall at username dot com।
Did you sign an invite code using the key in their bio? That's so neat! I'm not sure if you have more, but I'm also on the waitlist (bluesky@owen.sh) and would love to check it out.
That is very cool! Without utterly derailing this thread I'd love one too, I've been on the waitlist for a little while too but no luck yet. Eager to reserve my handle and kick the tyres early on.
I will say to be on topic that I am enjoying Mastodon, but the network effect isn't there yet. It's a pretty small minority of users from my feed that have either switched or are dabbling in both, so tech stack aside, I feel if Bluesky gets momentum it has the best chance of being a drop-in replacement for Twitter in the near-to-medium term, given the relative simplicity (this isn't a knock against Mastodon, more an acknowledgement of simplicity's factor in mass appeal).
Why are you surprised by that? Mastodon is older, a lot more ironed out (in its own quirky ways), actually open to the public, and bot-friendly. Of course it's orders of magnitude more popular at this point in time.
That said, even though I'm rooting for Mastodon, I would not be shocked if Bluesky catches up very quickly. In any case, any of the two is an improvement over a locked down and thoroughly broken Twitter.
Right, Blue sky is invite only, and has just started out. And like you, I strongly prefer Mastodon, but if Blue sky helps organize us into a post Twitter world so much the better.
The two initial waves of migrations from Twitter to Mastodon absolutely happened when "shit it the fan" in the Twitter world, just like now with Bluesky.
And if that's not a fair comparison, and neither is comparing them straight up by data right now, how could be fairly compare them then?
My understanding is that Bluesky as a company is building a client experience, and funding the development of the protocol, but the long term vision is for open source and federation, so no central controlling entity.
In fact there are already several other open source competing clients that can be used with the private beta, and Bluesky (currently) has no issue with this.
Another metric I would be interested in looking is verified skeeters (people with a custom root domain) vs verified Twitter users and separate Twitter Blue subscribers (with < 1 million followers)
So far it seems to be Mastodon, with some tweaks, and the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server. This addresses the critical flaw people point out with Mastodon, which is that because it requires you to choose a server it's too confusing. The requirement to choose a hosting provider is why email famously never took off.
Email started off as something you only got through your ISP. It then turned into something you only got through Google. It’s not really an example of a service where the vast majority of people make an active choice.
>the improvement that while it's federated in theory, right now there's only one server
has the federation even been implemented? Is it an open protocol? Why on earth should anybody trust them not to go back on their word once they've gotten enough critical mass that nobody wants to leave because that's where their friends are (the so-called "network effect")?
Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves.
One of the main reasons I'm still on twitter is because of how you can mute certain topics/words and accounts. Extensively using that has turned twitter into a source of learning and knowledge for me. I have also used uBlock to block the trending sidebar.
Ok. Now someone fine tune llama on this and then you’ll be able to understand how you’ll have a custom social user agent that shields you from toxic people and moderates on your behalf.
hmm... that makes it larger than RedPajama, a dataset of 1.2 trillion tokens
how much of reddit is being used for AI? it looks like there's plenty of text in there; maybe we just need to parse the reddit with GPT to filter out the good parts, and got a great dataset
Even on large platforms you can (technically) download all posts. Might take some time and you might need to cycle some storage, but it's doable. So I don't really think that's a great metric to observe usage.
Ignoring that judging usage based on a still invite only platform is also a little silly.
Would be interesting to see if your comment has any basis at all by comparing how things looked for Twitter at the same timescale, or Facebook, or any other social media.
Just to look at the numbers in isolation is hardly interesting.
Yes. It's interesting, from a tech perspective, to a lot of people here based on its combination of the decentralized nature of the AT protocol combined with usability that seems to work for people (compared to Mastodon).
It's small, but it has a lot of interesting ideas behind the scenes and interesting people using it.
Maybe it's anti-Elon, or maybe it's anti-the-things-Elon-is-doing-to-Twitter. Just because the people who like Elon have joined a cult of personality doesn't mean the people who dislike what he's done to Twitter have done the same.
For example, I still think Tesla's are cool cars and Space X is doing exciting things.
For me, Twitter has become absolutely unusable. Every person on my FYP and in the replies is someone with 328 followers, crappy opinions and $8/month to burn. I went from loving Twitter for over a decade to finding it utterly devoid of anything interesting anymore. If you happen to like it more now, that's great, keep using it! But a lot of people simply don't get value out of the app anymore.
> The former consent manufacturers are upset that Twitter no longer enforces adherence to their viewpoint.
This is a popular right wing conspiracy theory which is based on misdirection and tu quoque. In the reality based community, cancel culture and the limiting of free discourse is an inherent cultural value and political policy endemic in right wing, authoritarian systems. History is extremely clear on this point.
It was the left in the US for the entirety of the 20th century that defended free speech from the continual onslaught by the right, from the attacks on the labor unions, to the attacks on journalists, to the attacks on writers, to the indeceny book bans to the free speech movement at Berkeley. In every instance, it was the right who threatened free speech and employed cancel culture tactics. Reagan was one of the most famous purveyors of this cancel culture, destroying entire careers of professionals because they were accused of belonging to a political party (many of whom did not) that he didn’t like.
I don’t think I need to go into all the overt evidence of the current US policy positions on the right promoting book bans, the state-enforced limiting of free speech in the schools, the conservative crackdown on sex education and basic science on things like menstruation, and the denial of climate change. This is all well known and provable. It is happening now.
In an attempt to reverse and deny this historical reality, conservatives have blamed "consent manufacturers" (in this context, a dog whistle for liberals and the left stolen from Chomsky who used it in a slightly different way) for trying to limit and contain the measurable increase of hate speech and the explicit rise in political violence on their opponents fomented by this speech.
This attack on so-called consent manufacturers is an attack on the free and open media, which conservatives have managed to decimate at the local level, and consolidate and monopolize at the national level. This was all part of a highly coordinated campaign that began with Regan, who specifically decentralized the media to thank Murdoch who helped him win New York, fulfilling the promises of the Powell memo, and creating a propaganda and disinformation machine on the right that has misinformed Americans for close to forty years.
This is all documented and recorded. The short hand for "people can now say all kinds of things they couldn’t before" is that the right wing is no longer pretending to be part of modernity and is now openly embracing and defending authoritarianism, fascism, and the hate speech that fuels the political violence it wages on society. The veil has been taken off and the floodgates have been lifted. Lies are now equivalent to facts, facts are considered liberal lies, and reality is whatever the right thinks it should be.
This is just like I said—the recrudescence of the simmering violent and terrorist nature at the extremes of right wing discourse that Twitter has now normalized. Social Darwinism, might makes right, and open calls for violence are now becoming glorified above the rule of law and democratic norms and practices. This is the end result.
You don’t see the problem because you are part of the problem. To see the problem at hand, you have to see from a POV other than your own. That requires compassion, empathy, and putting yourself in the shoes of others that are wholly unlike yourself. This is impossible to do when the normalization of hate speech and attacks on the media and institutions require othering those who are not like you and do not fit into the silo of the right wing bubble. I have become totally disgusted by what I see on Twitter now. It is filled with the worst kind of people promoting the worst kind of ideas that have the worst kind of outcomes. The sooner the site shutters, the better.
I agree that we should be open to vibrant discourse and charitable to outgroups. But that's not what your GP comment actually did. What it did was tell the other person: you're failing to empathize, you have no ability to understand, you can't see a point of view other than your own, you've subscribed to an ideology, you dismiss anything that doesn't share your point of view.
No one on the receiving end of that will feel like they are being met with open, vibrant, charitable discourse! You have to show those qualities, not tell them.
I'm sure your intentions were good—it's just that the mechanics of "vibrant discourse and charitability to outgroups" are trickier than they seem. Nothing is easier than to unintentionally break them without realizing it. Therefore we all need to work hard at it consciously and listen to feedback when we get it wrong. Me most of all.
(btw the second half of your comment was just fine)
I've seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.
C'mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with everything and we've slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.
Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it's a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!
I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I'm sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I'll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well! I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.