I have been poking around bluesky and atproto as nothing more than an interested developer since around May 2023. I certainly don't know everything, but I've exercised most aspects of the protocol by now (firehose, custom feeds, sandbox federation, etc).
If you've always wondered something about this platform/protocol and want the opinion of a non-team member, ask away.
is there anything particularly compelling about it compared to a centralized platform? honestly still just waiting for the android app to not have terrible startup time and for there to be anybody on it
BlueSky feels like a centralized platform, which is (IMHO) important for user experience. Especially as a new user. But it's got the underlying tech of a distributed one, which means cool things. For example, I can run my own "algorithms" (in the sense that lay people talk about "the twitter algorithm" or "the facebook algorithm") or use ones that others have made, easily. There's a lot of interesting things technical users can do, and it's designed in such a way that non-technical users can take advantage of those things.
To use this, I just click through, and then "pin to home." it becomes a regular tab that I can view my feed through, just like the default ones. The "Quiet posters" algorithm here is one I'm actually interested in: I have often said one issue with the default algorithm is that I feel like I miss people who aren't actively posting when I happen to actively load up BlueSky. Now I can just check in on this feed and see those posts! What's going on here is very technically interesting, but as a user, I don't need to worry about any of that.
AT is what enables this, but is also broader than "short text posts." I am interested by future possibilities for AT, but that's more of a vision than something concrete today.
> is there anything particularly compelling about it compared to a centralized platform?
As a user? I'd say custom feeds. You can create alternative feeds using whatever algorithm you want that users can subscribe to in a way that is very smooth and user friendly. Third party alternatives have the feel of first party features.
As a developer? The protocol is "locked open," as it were. I feel confident building on it. It feels more like building for the web than within a walled garden. Bluesky could have made things easier for themselves by making certain aspects centralized, but they didn't compromise.
> honestly still just waiting for the android app to not have terrible startup time and for there to be anybody on it
There is a alternative client (https://graysky.app/) that you may have better luck with. Same deal as with custom feeds. They are not territorial about the existence of alternatives. The Graysky dev (@mozzius.dev) and the Bluesky social-app devs are very friendly with each other and share development techniques all the time.
Also, the official app has a Github repo (https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app) that accepts issues and PRs. I opened an issue recently as some icons were wrong in a particular location. Some non-team affiliated developer created a fix, opened a PR, and the core team merged it in and deployed it a few days later. That was pretty cool.
The community is interesting and while it definitely has a tech-y bias, it's a lot less Liberachat adjacent than big Fediverse instances are, so you get people in other niches using it. The community is still a lot smaller than Twitter though, which lends itself to feeling like a community more than being part of The Conversation that I presume Twitter goes for. The UX is very similar to Twitter. For me, my hobbies just aren't that well represented on Bluesky yet, but I like how nice the community feels. Just my impressions.
"Kinda" and "Soon", the soon part is that interactions with the site are signed by a key thats usually held for you by your PDS (Personal Data Server), this month we are opening things up more so you can run your own PDS, and thus use your own keys.
The Kinda part is that your identity by default is backed by a DID that delegates authority to specific keypairs. The keypair that your PDS uses to sign is included in there automatically, but on account creation you can currently set a backup keypair that allows you to manually sign identity operations.
I realize this may already be on the roadmap for after open federation, but I would love some sort of "bluesky for the truly paranoid (affectionate)" guide that explained soup to nuts how to participate in the network by running your own PDS and using did:web for identity. An answer to the question: I don't trust plc.directory for my identity and I don't trust the bsky.social PDS to host my data but I want to participate — how do I do that?
I have probably the least understanding of how this part of the protocol operates. Part of that has to do with the new (to me) concepts and the rest is open federation not being in place. I think something like this would be really useful and would prove your bonafides to others that Bluesky PBC is serious about being billionaire-proof.
The most straightforward way to fully use the network without trusting us at all would be to have your identity backed by a did:web, and run your own PDS. From there your posts will be indexed by our appView and you can see them in the app.
If you still don't trust our AppView to show you the right thing, you can definitely run your own (its a little hefty and requires indexing the whole network).
Beyond that, if you don't trust our relay to feed your AppView, you can run your own and have it scrape all the PDSs (the endpoints for this are open on each individual PDS).
At that point the app experience for you should be roughly equivalent (depending on how you choose to apply moderation actions) without using any of our infrastructure. You would still be able to interact with everyone, all your followers can still see your posts, and no normal users would notice you werent on the same servers as them.
Love it. A "choose your own adventure" depending on how much you distrust Bluesky PBC :)
My only feedback would be: I'd love to read a real deep dive on just bringing in your own did:web and using a custom PDS. The DIY AppView and/or Relay is super interesting, but that more straightforward concept of "you own your identity and you own your data" is such a powerful hook that I'd love to be able to share something straight from the docs.bsky.app domain on how to do it.
currently we support ed25519 and secp256k1 for signing, adding more key types isnt terribly hard, but does require coordination (everyone has to support it otherwise posts signed with that key type won't get propagated)
whyrusleeping answered this ably. They are part of the Bluesky team but aren't hiding the ball.
You can't do this today on the main network, no. Apparently they'll be "rolling out an experimental early version of federation" sometime later this month.
As for credibility on that timeline, the only major missed deadline they've had that I can recall was on making posts visible to those without an account. It was slated for (IIRC) late November/early December 2023 and launched December 21, 2023. I believe they overhauled the frontend as part of that work and it delayed things.
Also, they have already blessed one alternative DID method (`did:web`) and are open to slowly expanding that set (https://atproto.com/specs/did).
If you've always wondered something about this platform/protocol and want the opinion of a non-team member, ask away.