In social media land, new entrant Bluesky has been having a bit of a moment lately. When Musk declared ‘cis’ a slur, the site grew by 10%; when Musk decided to shut down Twitter over the weekend, it grew another 20%. Their corporate comms are extremely bad, so there have been a lot of weird takes about it floating around, and I thought now would be a good time to write up a little explainer. I’ve been pretty active on there for some months now, and involved with the developer community, so I feel reasonably well-qualified to write this. (I’d really like Bluesky to succeed, so I’m a bit biased.)
This post is long. If you need a quick read, or to read about some rumors you may have heard, I’d recommend the sections “Who owns Bluesky?” and everything else starting at “How does moderation work?”
And–open thread, I suppose (what thread isn’t?), looks like we need one.
So, without further ado:
What is Bluesky?
On its face, Bluesky is an invite-only clone of early Twitter. You can write posts, share and quote them, reply to them, and include images. There is no support for direct messages, videos/gifs, or hashtags. It is popular because it is very similar to Twitter, is not run by Elon Musk, and consists largely of refugees from Twitter, especially trans folks, who make up a large portion of the active userbase. And as an open-source community, it is of course chock full of furries. It’s not a great place for news, yet; just people having fun, for the most part. Even Jake Tapper mostly shitposts. Neil Gaiman is the most popular celebrity present.
Cool features include:
- Custom algorithms
- Free and open API
- Granular content policies
- Composable moderation
- Self-verification–your username can be a domain name or subdomain that you own
- For example, Ron Wyden’s handle is @wyden.senate.gov
- Easy account migration (upcoming)
Under the hood, Bluesky is the proof of concept for a decentralized social network built on top of a new protocol the team has developed, called ATProto. Bluesky will eventually become part of a federated social network; right now federation is only available in the developer sandbox, where it’s going pretty well. I wrote about Mastodon, another federated network, in some detail here; the broad strokes are similar enough:
Mastodon is a federated social network made up of thousands of separate, interoperable instances. Basically, anybody can create an instance, and then they all talk to each other[…] Imagine Reddit, with its thousands of Subreddits, each with its own rules and moderators–except there is no central organization tying them all together. The instances all voluntarily communicate to create a network-of-networks known as the Fediverse. By default, you can follow and interact with anybody on any instance.
Mastodon is backed by the ActivityPub protocol; ATProto has some fundamentally different goals that make it interesting to me.
Why is Bluesky?
“The company itself is a future adversary”–this is part of their vision statement. I shouldn’t need to point any further than Musk-run Twitter to explain why that’s good. Their goal is more or less a decentralized version of Twitter that, to the median user, will be no more complicated to use than Twitter.
One of my favorite features is custom algorithms. Everybody hates corporate algorithms, and for good reason–they’re designed to addict you, often by encouraging open combat with other users. They’re also the only game in town; you generally only get one algorithmic feed per social network. Bluesky, as a free and open social network with a “big world” mentality (more on this below), lets you build your own algorithm, and lets them live natively in the app. There are hundreds on offer. People have made one for each cluster on the social graph (popular ones include “trans and queer shitposters”, “Japanese language cluster”, “Blacksky”). The most popular one is for science, and consists of posts from pre-approved science communicators which include the 🧪 emoji. There’s a good one that consists of posts an AI has determined to include pictures of cats, and one that shows you the first post of every new user so you can help greet them.
In general, ATProto has been designed (and is being designed–they’re building the plane while it’s flying) to resist censorship and “enshittification”. In addition to things like custom algorithms, this also means making it easy to move your account somewhere else if you don’t like the way your instance is being run. The integrity of your social graph–posts, followers, blocks, the people you follow–is ensured cryptographically, so moving it is as simple as handing somebody else the key. (This has led people to believe that there are blockchains involved, but there are not. They just share an underlying data structure.)
Compare to Mastodon, where switching your account over requires the consent of your current host, who is the source of truth for your social graph; on Mastodon you also cannot migrate your posts. More on these differences below.
Who owns Bluesky?
Bluesky, PBLLC is a Public Benefit Limited Liability Corporation that was founded in 2021. It has nine employees. The CEO is named Jay Graber; she is relatively young, and a veteran of the Distributed Web world, aka some of the non-scammy parts of “Web3”, if you remember that. The lead developer is named Paul Frazee. He is my age, also a DiWeb veteran, and a longtime advocate for free and open source software. The other employees I don’t know as much about, but I believe they’re split between PR, back-office, and protocol engineering. There is also a 24/7 moderation team.
The project that would become Bluesky began as an independent team at Twitter, where Jack Dorsey wanted to create or tailor a free and open source protocol that Twitter could use in the future as part of a push towards decentralization. As such, he sits on the board, as one of three members, but that is the extent of his involvement. The exact share ownership breakdown is unknown, but his is not a majority. (It is also not the only decentralized social network he’s been involved with; he’s more prominently backing the cryptocurrency-community-heavy Nostr, because he is kind of a moron.)
What is ATProto?
A way of communicating between instances. When anybody does anything, it is stored and broadcast as an event, which paired instances can listen to. Using Merkle trees for this theoretically makes it easy to ensure integrity and process messages as patch updates. The protocol spec also calls for external services that are dedicated to indexing and search (which can also be selected by the user, like custom algorithms). This is the “big world” mentality I mentioned, compared to Mastodon’s “small world” mentality, where there is no search engine for the Fediverse, significant friction to finding users outside your own instance, and significant pain points upon account migration. Mastodon is good at being Mastodon, but it is bad at being a federated Twitter, which is why everybody bounced off it in October/November when they attempted to migrate en masse.
One major downside of ATProto as currently designed is that almost everything is public. Everything you post, all the images, even which accounts you’ve blocked. (They’re accepting comments from devs with ideas for fixing the block part.) This information can be private in Mastodon, though administrators of instances that federate with your account do have access to it all.
How does moderation work?
Right now, bsky.social is a single instance, with pretty standard social media moderation policies. Don’t threaten to beat Matt Yglesias to death with a hammer, or torture the children of members of the Supreme Court; don’t use slurs; don’t spam; you get the idea. The response time is pretty good for a small company with 200,000 users–problematic accounts are usually taken down within forty-eight hours, though posting lurid assassination fantasies will get you nuked within the hour.
Users can create mute lists, which other users can subscribe to, which are also useful.
Adult content and violent imagery are recognized by AI and labeled as such. You can choose to show, warn, or hide this content, along with things like violence, impersonation, and ‘hate groups’.
Wait–hate groups aren’t banned?
Of course they are. Which brings us to community labeling. Federated ATProto will support third-party labeling services that you can subscribe to. There will always be discontent about what constitutes e.g. ‘sexually suggestive’ or ‘violent’ speech; if you don’t like how posts are being labeled, you can switch to (or supplement with) a different labeler.
As the largest instance, bsky.social will have significant coercive power here, but it will not be the centralized voice of god.
I heard Bluesky is anti-black and anti-sex worker.
Okay, so the sex worker thing is for sure a tempest in a teapot. Apple made the app hide all NSFW content by default. You can only change this setting on the website. Apple made Reddit do the same thing, this is just an Apple issue. As for whether a thirst trap with erect nipples poking through constitutes ‘sexually suggestive’–I weighed in on this issue (it does!) and got blocked by about fifty people who are trying to advertise their OnlyFans. Nothing of value was lost.
Anti-blackness… I’m hesitant to weigh in on this, but I think it’s being reported very badly. This TechCrunch article can give you some background, but not very well, in my opinion. There have been a couple of blow-ups that more or less ended up pitting the trans community against the black community there. Like most forum drama, it all centered around a small number of users and posts, then blew up into an out-of-control hurricane of recriminations.
Somebody even made a list of users whose block lists are more than 10% black, to call them out. Considering that a lot of this drama revolves around an old Twitter beef between a few trans people, that list ended up mostly being trans people trying to hide from who they see as their old abusers. Ultimately the creator took the list down. My favorite part of that saga is that the creator originally set it at 9%, but this ended up including an account they liked, so rather than reconsider the whole idea they just upped it to 10%.
The fact remains that the app is significantly better-moderated than Twitter ever was.
I heard it’s based on a blockchain.
No! See “Why is Bluesky?” above.
I heard Jack Dorsey owns it.
No! See “Who owns Bluesky?” above.
I heard artists who post their work there are granting Bluesky ownership or something.
Nope. They originally used an off-the-shelf Terms Of Service that had some muddled wording on this point, though it was no worse than any other social network. It has been updated to be clearer. (Basically, they can use a screenshot of you sharing your work in promotional materials–same as everywhere else.)
I heard that they’re unfair about invite codes.
100% true. Every user is supposed to get one invite code every two weeks, but this doesn’t happen for a lot of them. Other users can get big piles of invite codes for targeted community building–for example, a couple of prominent black Twitter users were given hundreds. Something similar happened with the digital artist community. I got a dozen or so to help build the author community. Communication around this is very bad! They obviously do not have a plan here.
There are many more rumors!
I’m happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments, to the best of my ability.
Promoted from the comments: I heard images you post on Bluesky go straight into generative AI training!
This is not true. Here’s a response somebody got from the team:
Hi Marco, We currently use Hive’s existing models to generate labels for images — so this is the tool that helps us identify NSFW images, so we can apply the proper labels to them. Hive does not use Bluesky account content to fine-tune/train their models. That said, Bluesky is a public social network and AI companies might be scraping data from the internet! We actually just revised our Terms of Service to have less legalese in response to conversations with artists a few weeks ago to clarify that we do not own their content. That updated version of the TOS was published last week and you can find it here: [I link this in the post]. We’re always striving to make the dense technical, legal, etc. info easier to parse. From the Twitter thread that was going around though, it seems like there is some confusion in part with Hive’s terms — Hive’s terms state that they can train on “Demo” content freely, which is what users may submit for no cost to their demo pages. “Customer Content” is a different category altogether and they do not train on that data without explicit permission from the customer, and Bluesky did not grant that permission to them. Thank you.
Alison Rose
What else am I supposed to use social media for?
Thanks for this explainer. I signed up for the waitlist but no idea how long said “wait” will be.
Bill Arnold
Is it possible to create anonymous accounts?
(I mean hardcore, e.g. burner phone and Tor (or Tor plus additional proxies). Probably no 2FA.)
Which is to say, will it fully support dissidents?
Also, is there decent support for links (including previews)?
SiubhanDuinne
I was five minutes ago years old when I realised “Bluesky” is almost surely meant to rhyme with “you fly” or “grew high.” In my head, I’ve been rhyming it with “brewski.”
Nonrev
The only thing keeping me on twitter is some of the news and analysis. BlueSky should attract these folks. Frankly none of the other social media entrants have mass. Can’t wait to leave Twitter & Musk
dmsilev
Sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to reformat this as whatever the equivalent of a Twitter thread would be.
In all seriousness, thank you for the in-depth description. You mentioned the almost-all-public nature of messages etc.; will that preclude adding things like direct messages and other (semi) private communications?
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: actually a lot of people pronounce it like this, and the term for a new user is a newskie, rhymes with brewski.
@Bill Arnold: wellll, yes, you can register with a protonmail or whatever and then use the tor browser.
dmsilev
Another question, directly related to The Twitter Mess: screen names and impersonation thereof. Beyond the self-verification feature you mentioned, is there support for anything like pre-Musk-Twitter’s verified-user status? Or can I register an account in the name of Donald Trump and post a long series of messages tearfully confessing all of his crimes?
MattF
So… right now there’s just the one instance? I like the idea of federated instances, but the Mastodon experience with users who are not open source enthusiasts makes me skeptical. What’s the concrete advantage with federation, compared with, say, pre-Musk Twitter?
Betty Cracker
Thanks for doing this post! I’m assuming Bluesky will eventually allow users to post video? Still seems to be photos only for now.
Cathie from Canada
What pisses me off about Bluesky is that it won’t allow me to join. I’m just a nobody — and no important person is ever going to send me an invite. There are millions like me. Nobody cares what we think, but here is my take:
The whole point of Twitter was that little communities could spring up whenever they needed to — knitting twitter, horse twitter, downtown restaurants twitter, disaster twitter. People could stay on twitter for a while, then go quiet, then get back to it, whatever. Twitter became whatever people needed it to be.
Bluesky won’t be of service to anyone until it allows people to join it without restriction, then moderates their posts if they turn out to be assholes.
Alison Rose
@SiubhanDuinne: I figured it was “blue sky” but I have always said it in my head as “blewski” because it sounds funnier.
dmsilev
How is Bluesky PBLLC funded? Donations, ad sales, VC capital, other? Once the distributed nature of the system kicks in, what is envisioned for supporting the instances? If this is going to work long term, at similar scale to Twitter, that’s an important thing to know about since the infrastructure, be it centralized in one instance or distributed across a range of providers, will be substantial and hence expensive.
MattF
Oh, also— what’s the business plan? What’s being monetized?
Baud
This really is a full service blog. Thank you.
Tony Jay farts in your general direction.
Onkel Fritze
Any way to read stuff just with your browser, without being logged in? Doesn’t seem to be the case.
twbrandt
Thanks for this. There is a bunch of anti-bluesky sentiment on masto atm because Jack apparently endorsed RFK Jr, but I’m not sure if that’s a good reason to avoid bluesky.
Ken
With media (social or otherwise) it’s always the readers, in some way. So a more interesting question, to me, is how.
Betty Cracker
@Cathie from Canada: I think the invitation-only thing is just for beta mode to keep growth manageable and that it will eventually be open to anyone. I agree it wouldn’t be a plausible Twitter replacement if it were to remain a closed system.
Another Scott
Thanks for posting this.
You kinda addressed this, but I’m not sure if your comment covers the AI issue.
(Repost from downstairs:)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Also from downstairs:
Twitter embed so everyone can see the text:
There’s basically no way to prevent people from using information gathered from crawling the web, including a specific site, in whatever ways they chose. If there are obvious copyright violations, they can be pursued. A site policy saying otherwise would sooth some people but it would almost entirely lack enforce-ability.
West of the Rockies
Not a Mastodon user, but IMO, instances is a terrible term.
Baud
@West of the Rockies:
Agree.
Bill Arnold
@West of the Rockies:
Leakage of computer science vocabulary into general usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_(computer_science)
Also, “instantiation” is the act of creating an “instance”.
MattF
@West of the Rockies: It’s borrowed from object-oriented programming jargon. The idea is that it’s a concrete package of data and actions that act as a unit. Vague, I know.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Good points all around – if you post it, you should expect that it might be on the front page of FTFNYT some day.
This is why everyone should simultaneously create NFTs* for everything they post. //
Cheers,
Scott.
—
* – are NFTs still a thing??
Ken
@Bill Arnold: As a programmer, I am the first to admit that as a group we sometimes appear to have a vocabulary of about ten words. Some of these, in no particular order, are object, function, class, instance, utility, parameter, . . . um . . .
As a group, we sometimes appear to have a vocabulary of about six words…
Eolirin
Business model is the biggest question here to me. I’m not sure how this stuff gets funded long term. While you can do crowd sourcing for some of the instance stuff, I’m not sure if you can manage Twitter like scale through crowdfunding.
Ken
Oh yes, and still working quite well for their main design goal, the separation of cash from the marks.
Gin & Tonic
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I got an invite code from Anne Laurie the other day, and after a long delay it worked, but I haven’t started using it yet because I’ve had other issues. Understanding it will be helpful once I’m ready to get in and start it up.
MattF
@Ken: E.g., this.
Major Major Major Major
@dmsilev: No, only self-verification. The idea is to not have a centralized authority there.
@MattF:
Federation is about not having a centralized authority, so that if Elon Musk buys Bluesky, you can just move to an instance that he didn’t buy. One core idea of Bluesky is to make it so that users for the most part don’t notice the federation, unless they really want to, or (as in that example) may need to.
@Betty Cracker:
Eventually, but not for a while. It’s much more difficult to manage Trust & Safety with video uploads, plus the associated hosting overhead can be a nightmare.
dm
@SiubhanDuinne: what do you mean, “‘geocities’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘atrocities’?”
Eduardo
I am using Twitter basically for following the news (started with the data guys for the 2000 elections, COVID scientists, renewable energy people, Ukraine knowledgeable people). It is really useful and unfortunately addictive if used this way.
Do you foresee a critical mass of these people will at least co-post in BlueSky?
Major Major Major Major
@Cathie from Canada:
I believe they send five to ten thousand invites out to the waitlist every day.
They have good moderation. One of the reasons they have good moderation with such a small team is because it’s invite-only. It will probably federate before it does open sign-ups, so you’d be able to make an account at a satellite instance for knitters or what-have-you.
@dmsilev: Monetization is a big open question, for sure. Right now they’re either still on their Twitter seed fund or have additional investors that aren’t showing up on Crunchbase.
@Onkel Fritze: Yes and no. With the free and open API, there are many ways you could access posts (for example, here is a firehose of all posts), but the app UI itself is only accessible with a login.
bjacques
Thanks for this. I’ll stop hanging Jack Dorsey around Bluesky’s neck. As long as he doesn’t have a controlling interest it’s all good.
Steeplejack
Which is, approximately?
Baud
So in the end, is this just Mastodon with better better, or more sophisticated, protocols?
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: Here’s a response from the team somebody got on that question:
tobie
I’m not sure I want to go back to something like Twitter. I feel like Twitter made me a mean person.
Teri Kanefield mentioned in a thread discussing BlueSky on Mastodon that as long as BlueSky is in the testing phase, it’s dependent on Twitter, and if Twitter implodes BlueSky will also be vulnerable. I don’t know how true this is.
Major Major Major Major
@Eduardo:
The user base isn’t big enough (and the app isn’t open enough) to support following the news right now. While the Science feed is the most popular one, it’s largely biologists. I do follow an account that does word clouds of anomalously-popular words in posts, which is how I found out about the headlines for Trump’s indictment, supreme court rulings, the submersible… but it’s not a place for news yet. As I said, even Jake Tapper mostly shitposts.
@Steeplejack: late 30s
@Baud:
The goal is for it to have a very similar user experience to Twitter, and the protocol is designed around that, with the “big world” view. No matter where you’re using it, you’ll be looking into the whole ATProto universe. Mastodon is based on a publisher-subscription model of handshakes between individual instances and users, so it has a small-world feel. They’re hoping to sidestep all that.
BR
@Eduardo:
FWIW, I am using Mastodon for most of the uses you list. Mostly I’ve found you just need to follow everyone you can find there because there’s no algorithm sending you things to read, but once you follow a bunch of folks all of what I’m looking to read and more is there.
Major Major Major Major
@tobie:
They’re completely separate companies, so I’m not sure why this would affect them. While Bluesky did have some troubles during this weekend’s twitter shutdown, that was because everybody was flocking to Bluesky, and it took them a hot minute to scale up.
BR
@Baud:
I’d say different protocols, not better or worse. There are some fundamental issues with BlueSky’s protocols, just as there are with ActivityPub. To oversimplify, BlueSky is “web3 native” and ActivityPub is “web native”. BlueSky uses identity mechanisms that were developed for blockchain-based systems, DIDs, and that has long been known to entail certain tradeoffs. Mastodon is more like email: each server has its users and policies but anyone who uses email on any server can talk so email is one global system.
Adam L Silverman
Quick question, is there a way to see what’s being posted without an account? Like was possible with Twitter until early last Friday morning?
Adam L Silverman
Just a quick note. I’ve got some stuff to do this evening, so the update post will be coming in closer to 10 or 10:30 EDT.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks.
Baud
@BR:
Thanks.
tobie
@Major Major Major Major: I’d have to ask her what she meant.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman:
You have to use third-party tools. Firesky lets you view (and filter, top right) the firehose of messages as they come in, for example. But there’s nothing like pre-Friday Twitter browsing available at the moment, which is not to say somebody couldn’t build it.
BR
The quiet win from behind in the post-twitter race might end up being Calckey. When I look at it I don’t get it because I guess I’m too old — it was started by some LGBT college students here in CA. It seems to be taking off among the kids who are looking for the new thing.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks for sharing your knowledge with all of us! I was curious about the AI angle as well.
Major Major Major Major
@BR: calckey is ActivityPub, so part of the Fediverse (which is mostly mastodon). Seems like an improvement over mastodon but still fundamentally a small-world service. My first experience with it was seeing a lengthy thread about how Bluesky is founded by and full of nazis, lol, so make of that what you will.
BR
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeah, though I don’t quite get your meaning about “small world service”. (I don’t think there’s anything inherent in ActivityPub, or AT for that matter, that is going to really affect scaling in any significant way. For all the arguments I’ve seen on both sides, and having built lots of systems of this sort over the years, neither seems hard to scale.)
rikyrah
Something is wrong with this child 😳😳😲😲
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8eg8nde/
Baud
PSA: I just learned that if you have the twitter app, you don’t have to log in to view tweets.
Major Major Major Major
@BR: it’s not really about scaling. Bluesky is designed to feel like twitter, where there’s one universe of stuff and when you log in you can by default interact with the whole universe (federation drama notwithstanding). You can search the whole universe and so on.
The mastodon community actively opposes universal search engines (and by association, algorithms). ActivityPub’s nature also makes it harder to index at scale. But you’re right that much of ATP is just shifting around some trade offs. the hostility of the mastodon community to a big-world experience is probably the biggest impediment.
Martin
The problems I see here:
Mastodon avoids algorithmic feeds and algorithmic feeds with federated instances (where Bluesky is heading) presents some really challenging problems to scaling and moderation and user ease of use. Community labeling presents some of its own challenges including how is that financed, and how do users discover and interact with that.
2. A federated Bluesky will still suffer from one of the main problems with Mastodon where verification is reliant on domain ownership, and the public entities that would be most useful to have verified on Mastodon aren’t because they don’t have the tech infrastructure to run their own instance, even with Mastodon hosting services out there. And even places that absolutely have the tech infrastructure aren’t doing it (like universities) for host of other reasons – a public university moderating runs into a first amendment issue in a way that a private company does not, etc.
3. While Bluesky is trying to smooth over the edges of Federation which Mastodon has not, it still leaves users having to do a lot of the same effort given that so far all of those issues are ‘we’ll deal with that later’ and it’s hard to differentiate between ‘we’re taking out time to get this right’ from ‘we have no fucking idea how to solve this’, and given I’ve never seen a successful implementation that gets it right, I’m assuming there really isn’t one. There seems to be this assertion that independence requires delegating all responsibility, which is more of a business model problem – if we give you independence, we lose our ability to monetize to pay for the responsibility, so we’re going to sever those completely. This is the problem that Reddit has had to cope with – it’s not federated, but subreddits are largely independent to set their policies, so Reddit corporate had to figure out what to do with anti-black racist subreddits, creepshot subreddits, and so on. I’m not convinced that fully delegating this to federated instances or even more abstracted community tagging services is the right way to go. I’m reminded of when various government agencies have tried to engage with Mastodon to provide notifications and got booted from the fediverse because they got generically labeled as cops
4. Facebook, whether or not you see them as a positive or neutral or negative agent to the fediverse seems like a bad entity to bet against when talking about post-Twitter. People are only going to distribute their energy so much in all of this, and until we see that service, I think users that need the kind of reach that Twitter provides them will keep Bluesky at arms length.
dc
@BR:
Me too. And on Twitter, I’ve never used the algorithm, yet by following a few accounts, and then interesting retweeted accounts, and so on, my list of follows has grown to the point where my feed of only those I follow is more than I could keep up with if I wanted to read every tweet that runs through there. On Mastodon, I also follow enough accounts that I get a lot of content I’m interested in and through boosts from those accounts, I follow even more account. Also, following hashtags is another way of finding accounts that you are interested in on Mastodon.
Ken
@Baud: Not today, at least.
Baud
@Martin:
Huh? How can you be forced off the fediverse?
If Mastodon takes off, I would think the government would have its own instance.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin:
Not true. ATProto accounts are self-verifying via DNS record. If you own wyden.senate.gov, you can make it your username by adding one record to your server, which he did. The nytimes could make a subdomain account for each journalist. And so on.
Gary K
Somewhere between 15 and 70?
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
What happens if he leaves the Senate?
Martin
@Baud: Be banned sufficiently far and wide that you lose all meaningful connection to the larger collection of instances. One downside of those larger instances is they can really have a big impact there.
dc
On Mastodon, you can also use the Explore function to see the most boosted posts, people, hashtags, and news (most shared stories from news sites).
Baud
@Martin:
Who banned which agencies? Was it before Elon bought twitter and engendered the migration to and growth of Mastodon?
karen marie
All I need to know about Bluesky is that it’s a Jack Dorsey project. He’s already fucked everyone up by building Twitter, then abandoning it to Musk. So now I’m expected to sign up for that again?
No, thanks.
BR
@Baud:
The German Bund is running their own Mastodon server: https://social.bund.de/about
As is the EU: https://social.network.europa.eu/about
I’d bet more will do the same.
Also several news outlets have started running their own. (The Texas Observer comes to mind.)
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: yeah, the “fediblock” whisper campaigns are a really dumb way to run something.
@Baud: assuming that DNS record vanished, he’d need to make a new handle, maybe @ronwyden.com or whatever personal site he might actually have.
Major Major Major Major
@karen marie:
Did you read the post?
Doug R
@Cathie from Canada: Thank You!
Baud
@BR:
I was hoping BJ would have an instance. I’m toying with joining but don’t know which instance I want to join.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
If people are banning federal agencies, then it’s not a serious community.
BR
@Major Major Major Major:
I think this is perhaps also the very nature of self organizing systems rather than centralized ones. I’ve seen, since mid last year, three waves on Mastodon, and now I’m pretty happy with where things are at. The first wave was hostile to newcomers and there was a bunch of drama. But so many people joined and so many new instances started that all of that was drowned out. The second wave was some recent (somewhat warranted, but also somewhat tedious) discussion about whether to federate with Meta if/when they join. The third phase is what I think we’re in now, where the overly dramatic instance admins are largely losing users or handing over the keys, as people largely *do* seem to be adopting a global-connected-network view of things. I find that there are a few hives of drama but I follow thousands of users and don’t see any of it thanks to who I follow and my filter settings.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: I’ve not seen enough interest to want to go to the trouble. Just join mastodon.social or another big one maybe?
BR
@Baud:
I really don’t think that’s happening, and I’m plugged into the weather community on Mastodon that interacts with at least that side of the federal government.
As for servers, you might try calckey.social if you want to be with the cool kids, or something simple like sfba.social or the hilarious weirdos at beige.party
And then the first user to follow is @[email protected] because she boosts tons of random stuff so it’s like you have an algorithm without an algorithm.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
No worries. It probably isn’t worth the trouble. I will probably end up at a generic instance like Mastodon.social, if I decide to take the plunge.
trollhattan
Can it be viewed from inside a browser, like Twitter could before last Friday?
Baud
@BR:
Thanks for the suggestions.
ETA: Hilarious weirdos sound like my kind of people.
Major Major Major Major
@trollhattan: you need an account, and it’s invite-only right now unfortunately.
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
There’s a (Weird Al) song for that!
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Well, yeah, they *can* do these things, and those things don’t seem that onerous, until you run into the policies and internal processes of these organizations and realize just how big of a lift it is for many of them.
Say what you will for Twitters blue check mark pre-Musk but it did do an adequate job of this without requiring any real institutional work on the part of organizations.
Bluesky is going to have to deliver a decent pay-off I think for these entities to do this sort of thing. We’ve tried this many times before and it’s yet to work. Even things like email eventually got centralized back under Google.
BR
@Baud:
Yeah, they are an interesting bunch: https://beige.party/public/local
Major Major Major Major
@BR: remember when Raspberry Pi got defederated because they hired a former police officer, and then were sort of rude to the people who were being dicks about it?
BR
@Martin:
Yeah, re-centralization is going to be a major tricky thing for any of these systems to avoid. The pressures to do it will be immense.
satby
Yeah, I signed on, spent an hour, and never went back to mastodon. The big-world experience is kinda the point of social media for me.
Baud
@satby:
Are you on Bluesky?
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: pre-Musk verification did a bad job of fulfilling its alleged purpose: verifying identities. It was done haphazardly if it was done at all. Self-verification, like many things about decentralized networks, is intended to sidestep this issue entirely. If a senator and the Washington post can figure it out I’m confident other people and organizations can.
BR
@Major Major Major Major:
I do remember the drama, and some may not like the messiness of it, but I think it’s democracy in action: it’s not like mastodon.social defederated them (to my knowledge). They have 42K followers right now. Some smaller instances did defederate, but eh — their users chose to go to a niche server with certain values and they can migrate if they want.
Martin
@Baud: CISA got banned by some big instances for basically ‘looking like cops’. Last year, I think. Definitely pre-Musk.
But we’re seeing a similar campaign starting up around Facebooks ActivityPub based service of blocking them simply because the community doesn’t want to empower Facebook.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: that one’s so funny to me since it seems like Meta Threads entering the Fediverse is basically victory for ActivityPub. As a community obsessed with how other decentralized protocols are bad, you’d think they’d be into that.
Baud
@Martin:
Thanks. Makes me lean toward a larger instance, which I assume is less susceptible to idiosyncratic banning campaigns.
satby
@Baud: yes, joined on AL’s invitation this morning, like G&T did. Found a few of my old Twitter follows immediately (like Popehat). So far a far more user friendly experience than the other alternatives, though Spoutible is pretty easy too. But relentlessly banal from what I’ve seen (and I haven’t checked it for 2 weeks). I want news and views from around the world, that’s why I’m still on Twitter. I think Blue Sky shows more potential so far.
Burnspbesq
@Alison Rose:
Why else would anyone need to own a hammer?
Major Major Major Major
@satby:
Check out the custom feeds, there’s something for everyone. I recommend cats, What’s Hot Classic, Home+. If you’re just following the same old accounts you’re going to get the same old content. You should make sure your NSFW settings aren’t set to ‘hide’, if you’re into that.
dc
@satby: Popehat is on Mastodon too. I follow his account.
Baud
@satby:
I suspect it’ll take a good while for content to migrate to other platforms, given how huge Twitter is. Unless Twitter goes kablooey.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Part of it was that he was a cop, but part of it too was that their hardware was REALLY hard for people to buy (it’s gotten a fair bit better) and the ‘cop’ was advocating for using RPis as great ways to surveil people without being discovered (because they’re small enough to disguise) and the community responding like ‘no wonder we can’t get these things if this is now just a law enforcement tool’. And that too, one of the more common use for RPis was to detect IMSI catchers by people protesting (cell towers tipped up by police to document who is in attendance).
So it was a bit more than just ‘we hired a cop’, it was a broader community protest about the direction that RPi appeared at that time to be heading, and robbing them of some of their social media connectivity was seen as fair game.
Mousebumples
I have a Mastodon account, but my sports follows, primarily, didn’t make the switch, so I still use Twitter periodically.
For the record, logging into my phone browser (Brave) seems to have bypassed the rate limit, fwiw.
I’m open to doing something else, but I don’t want accounts on Bluesky Spoutible, Spill, Post,… And whatever else there will be.
Martin
@Baud: That hasn’t been my experience. I think you can usually tell from the nature of the instance – if the emphasis is more general interest, less likely they are to do weird banning decisions. Mine is urbanist focused and the mods put out a little survey every few months around a specific issue and we’re generally ‘eh, leave them alone’.
zhena gogolia
Wow, it would be great if I understood a single word of what everyone is talking about.
Back to crossword puzzles, I guess.
Sure Lurkalot
The sad saga of Musk’s Twitter shows the hazard of an all hands on deck utility while a lot of the criticism of new platforms is their lack of reach. It seem many people want their new chosen space to be a Twitter/NotTwitter. It’s kind of hilarious because pre-Musk, there were a lot of complaints about Twitter.
I feel bad for people like Aaron Rupar whose livelihoods are tied to Twitter. I don’t see how having feeds on 3 or 4 platforms is feasible or a desirable workaround. And yet they helped consolidate the power Twitter has over them.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I’ve always been about 10 years behind the latest in tech. I’ll stick with the Twitter machine until it implodes. Then I’ll join another party super late.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
If we didn’t cancel everybody, Musk wouldn’t have need to buy twitter.
Another Scott
@Baud: Anyone can put up a Mastodon instance.
A spreadsheet of Members of Congress with official accounts on Mastodon.
GovTech.com (from November 2022):
So, people are thinking about the future anyway.
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not sure it is really victory. Remember when Google talk was using XMPP and then they abandoned it and essentially snuffed out XMPP.
I don’t really trust publicly traded companies when it comes to these kind of things.
Martin
@Burnspbesq: It’s like that old marketing adage: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to beat Matt Yglesias to death.”
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: I still don’t, and likely will never, understand the point of all the separate “instances” on Mastodon. It made it feel so messy trying to find people, see their follow lists, etc. Mastodon doesn’t feel like a replacement for Twitter, where everything is in one feed when you log in (well, I guess they added that “for you” thing, but you can ignore that). It felt instead like a substitute for, I don’t know, subreddits or Facebook groups. I guess I’m not cool or techie enough to be enthralled by the Mastodon concept. I just want something where everything is in one place and where I don’t have to go through multiple steps to find or follow people.
gwangung
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, in my area, it was notorious for not verifying Paula Vogel, a major American playwright, for some unknown reason (possibly having to do with sexism).
But a) that’s not a knock on verification and b) it’s way better than Twitter’s current non system.
Alison Rose
@Burnspbesq: To threaten to beat PG&E execs with it?
At least, that’s MY main reason.
Spider-Dan
It seems to me that the invite-only part of Bluesky is significantly distorting the view of the product (by making it appear better than it will be). If I were being cynical, I’d say invite-only is being used to the same end as Facebook’s early restrictions on which universities’ alumni were allowed to have Facebook accounts: create a sense of value (in this case, “ooh, I got a Bluesky invite!”) through manufactured scarcity, exploit this value to lock in high-profile users, then leverage your high-profile userbase to win the signup war. I think the “we’re just in beta! we don’t want to grow too fast!” story is too cute by half – there are ways to limit your growth that do not involve personally selecting candidates for invites and allowing those candidates to themselves personally select more candidates, e.g. a lottery system, or just plain old first-come-first-serve – and I think Bluesky will coincidentally get out of beta when they feel they’ve captured enough of the stars of Twitter to squeeze out Mastodon et al.
I know my opinion on this is biased, though. I have a gripe with the personal-invite-only model on a fundamental level.
cain
This already happened on mastodon a year ago. The LGBTQ community is the first to arrive since they were literally fleeing Nazis on Twitter.
The two communities are at odds with each other because they disagree about safety. I talked about this before but transgender and other neurodivergent folks have a ton of triggers and it’s why there are things like content warnings.
Black folks derive their safety by exposure and sharing.
Essentially, it can be fixed in mastodon by client side features that will let you override the safety triggers. But I think the CW is a good thing to be able to switch on and off depending on your mood.
Cathie from Canada
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks Major.
I can’t even tell whether I’m on their “waitlist” or not – i have submitted numerous times but never had an acknowledgement.
And now that I have been tipped off in this comment thread that Bluesky founder Dorsey has endorsed RFK Jr for president over Biden — well, that ends it for me.
I hope Bluesky fails and takes all Dorsey’s money and credibility with it.
Major Major Major Major
@Cathie from Canada: well, since his money and credibility are in no way tied up with Bluesky, I think you might be hoping in vain.
I hope it succeeds so the Dorseys and Musks of the world have less influence.
Martin
@Alison Rose: There’s three reasons:
Another Scott
@Alison Rose: I think the idea of the separate “instances” is to let things grow and evolve without a central choke point (and a central server farm under the control of one evil corporation).
It’s still very much in the growing phase, and presumably it will be easier to find and talk with people on other instances over time.
https://mastodon.social/explore lets you see:
so there are ways to see stuff scattered over many “instances”.
HTH a little.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major: Got it, thanks.
More from the Land ‘o Musk.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23783092/twitter-tweetdeck-new-preview-force-legacy-apis
So much winning.
Alison Rose
@Martin: I get all of that, but it doesn’t make the functionality of it any more attractive to me.
karen marie
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, I did. Again, it’s Jack Dorsey.
Martin
@cain: Other conventions on Mastodon is that it historically has been much more accessible for people with disabilities so things like alt text on images is a must-have. That really slows down the impulsive nature for a lot of Twitter posters that want to snap a photo, add 4 words and post. Gotta work a bit harder than that.
CW also helps to make the network to not feel like it’s being taken over. It’s annoying for a LOT of people to try and use Twitter for normal things on days like Super Bowl Sunday because 95% of the content is related to the game, you can’t filter it out and you can no longer use it for anything else. CW at least collapses the content so one post isn’t the only thing on your screen, and you can usually have that stuff expanded/collapsed by default depending on your client.
Juju
@SiubhanDuinne: Are you sure? I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be pronounced blewski.
Also, I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw it that way, and realistically will see it as blewsky forever.
Baud
@Juju:
The Big Lebluesky!
karen marie
@Cathie from Canada: Thank you.
Telling me that Dorsey doesn’t have any “money or credibility” tied up in Bluesky is blowing smoke so hard, someone’s going to self-asphyxiate.
He only sits on the board of directors. If he hasn’t got any money invested in it, that makes it worse. He wants YOU to invest in something he’s not willing to invest in.
Personally, I think it’s all royal bullshit. I also think it’s never going to be “the next big thing.”
satby
@Major Major Major Major: @dc: I didn’t explicitly state it, but implicit in why a lot of people are still on Twitter is most of us don’t want multiple accounts all over the place. I don’t like mastodon even though a lot of people I do like are on it. I think Spoutible is fine but sort of boring (and I have mostly unique follows there who I’ve never seen comment elsewhere, but YMMV). I understand it’s a period of change for everyone, but my ideal Twitter replacement will be like pre-muskrat twitter: lots of news feeds both national and international, lots of science feeds (Bluesky is developing that), lots of smart snarky analysis from people who have expertise in different areas, lots of fun diversions like animal videos or 100 year old photo restorations like Babbelcolor. It took years for Twitter to offer all of that, so I guess we’ll all have to wait.
Martin
@Alison Rose: If you don’t like what Musk has done with Twitter, #3 is literally the only solution we have to that problem right now, whether it’s attractive or not. #2 has real implications on moderation at Twitters scale, so some of the larger content issues is actually related to how it’s funded.
You may not want to lean into these bigger picture relationships, but everyone eventually feels the consequences of them, then goes off and complains about that. Some of us sit back and wonder ‘what did you expect was going to happen?’.
You get a lot of this around climate change – what kinds of things get incentivized by various structures and policies. Yeah, there’s not much that is attractive about taking a bus until the consequences of everyone driving is felt and peoples houses are underwater or on fire.
I have a hard time differentiating your statement from ‘whats the point of voting, all the parties are the same’.
Spider-Dan
@Martin: If I had to draw a sloppy analogy, I’d the migration from Twitter to federated Twitter-clones is like migrating from AOL’s curated content presentation on their in-house servers over to the greater WWW in the ’90s. There’s certainly greater potential for shenanigans from bad actors, but there’s also potential for Something Better Than Before, and we definitely eliminate the possibility of another Muskzilla surfacing from the ocean and destroying the city.
JGreen
You may have been joking, but I agree completely about Balloon Juice being a full service blog.
I don’t do Twitter, Facebook or anything remotely like them, but I really appreciate the in-depth information posted all in one place. The David Anderson insurance posts are like that, too, and it’s not the only subject you can get good, comprehensive, information about on this blog.
I don’t care if it’s a long read It’s far better than someone trying to condense this kind of thing in 280 characters or whatever it is. You can’t find this just anywhere and it’s very valuable to have.
And, yes, if you think this is long, just have a look at practically anything about the UK that Tony Jay writes. But, it’s worth the reading, even if you have to diagram the sentences to figure out which is the subject and which are the adjectives.
Major Major Major Major
@karen marie: and his role in Bluesky is…?
BR
@Another Scott:
Yeah the distributed part took a few days to get used to but once I thought of it as like email addresses then my brain stopped rebelling.
My substitute for algorithms has been following people who curate lots of good stuff. Some examples:
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
JGreen
@JGreen: Ok, I know that this thread is mostly dying (but not quite dead yet), but my previous comment was meant to be a response to Baud at #14.
This is why some of us just lurk; I am terrible with technology and I should just stick to reading the posts.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Unless Twitter goes kablooey.
I think it’s too musk time (late) for that.
IOW, he keeps stirring up everything, working with what 4 or 5 people trying to fix it and that seems to be working so well…..
satby
@JGreen: Nah, you’re good 😉 Keep commenting!
Bennett
Post.news I’d absolutely lovely: wide open, simple, friendly, liberal, smart, easy. And growing. Why does no one mention it?
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: Yeah. I just want Twitter to be visible again!
catclub
How about beating within in inch of his life, with a rotten mackerel?
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
I’d rather congeal with the interesting folks on Spoutible over Bluesky or anything else. But nothing has critical mass rn.
UncleEbeneezer
All I can say is, having watched Black Mirror S6 first episode “Joan Is Awful” last night, make sure you read the Terms & Conditions of any service you decide to join, lol. Black Mirror, six seasons in, is still one of the biggest/best mind-f*ck tv shows out there. Although I think The Rehearsal probably takes the cake for the ultimate mind-f*ck show with Atlanta just behind Black Mirror in third place.
Miss Bianca
@Cathie from Canada: Agreed. But I think it will have to go to non-invite status sooner rather than later if they actually want to grow.
Remember, Gmail used to be invite-only as well!
Scout211
I just read this on Yahoo news
Nukular Biskits
Excellent nutshell.
Just created my Mastodon account yesterday … but did nothing else with it.
From what you’ve written here, looks like Bluesky might be a better alternative.
Spider-Dan
@Miss Bianca: The difference between Gmail being invite-only (or even some specific Mastodon instances being invite-only) and Bluesky being invite-only is that you don’t have to sign up with “Gmail” to send & receive internet e-mail. You can sign up with Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail, or whatever. The same goes for the invite-only Mastodon instances… just sign up with a different instance, many of which are connected to each other.
But since Bluesky isn’t (yet?) federated, if you can’t sign up at Bluesky proper, then you can’t use Bluesky. Period.
moonbat
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team:
Me too. Spoutible saw a 700 percent increase in traffic (!!) as a result of Musk’s latest monetizing misadventure. So we might see that critical mass coming sooner than later. Time will tell.
Ben Cisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks for posting this. Joined the wait list.
Bobby Thomson
The whole Jai vs the world thing reeks of junior high school grudges and mean girling, but hardly unique to Bluesky.
The Mastodon similarity is enough to keep me away, though. The build-your-own platform thing just reminds me of people who think everyone should build their own PCs.
Also, @jack is a certifiable moron who got repeatedly gamed by Nazis at Twitter and he is RUNNING THINGS.
I’m sticking with the gang dunking on Elmo.
Bobby Thomson
@satby: This. Good summary.
Dan B
@Bobby Thomson: No, Jack Dorsey is not running BlueSky. He’s on the Board but not very active and is a minor shareholder
If that changes I’m c9ndident that 4M will inform us.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
You’re not alone.
Figured it was some ultra-kewl hipster lingo alien to this old gray noggin.
(In Ukraine, would it be Blueskyy?)
NotMax
Topical.
So where are we all supposed to go now?.
Aris Merquoni
Major, part of the concern I heard was from romance novel authors who were being censored from showing their book covers and thus wouldn’t be able to use BlueSky to reach their audience. Has that been resolved? I used to read a few different twitter experts on the subject but I never had a twitter of my own so my access to their posts has been revoked and I can’t check up.
For my part I’m with Dreamwidth’s Rahaeli on most of these social networks: So far none of them are built to make trust and safety a priority, which means none of them should be trusted with your privacy and your safety. Twitter had the luxury of being able to build up a T&S department that was large enough to deal with the site’s failings with pure human labor, but if any of these other sites/protocols get enough traffic, we are going to see more examples of violations until those sites beef up their teams.
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Cathie from Canada: As someone who was on Twitter almost from the beginning (and has not been, and do not expect to be allowed on BS): This is a “Filtering”.
Jack started Twitter. Why trust him, this time?
Eolirin
@mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho)): You don’t need to, he has no power over BlueSky’s direction or operations.
PaulWartenberg
Is Spoutible respectable?
Juju
@Baud: That works.
Major Major Major Major
@Eolirin: and even if he did—decentralized protocol!
Another Scott
@PaulWartenberg: Bouzy seems to be level-headed and seems to know what he’s doing.
But that’s just my very quick impression.
Choice is good, and important.
Keep your wits about you, wherever you are out there.
Cheers,
Scott.
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Eolirin: Many seem awful eager to get herded over to the next shiny green field that’s been planted for them, is all I’m saying.
Graze up, I guess…
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Major Major Major Major: If it’s so “decentralized”… why do we need an invite?
Major Major Major Major
@Aris Merquoni:
Funny, that never crossed my feed over all the onlyfans whining. That does sound like an issue, though a lot of those covers are sexually suggestive! The AI labels are a work in progress like everything else. I’m sure a compromise can be reached soon enough.
Re: the rest of your post, this sort of trust & safety lock-in thing is, I’m worried, just going to keep people on twitter. The only other player that can magic up a fully functioning enterprise-level T&S team is Meta, whose ActivityPub service, Threads, will be launching any day now. So maybe they’ll just win by default.
Major Major Major Major
@mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho)): as I explain in the post, federation hasn’t launched yet. Once it does, bsky.social will continue being invite only, but other services will do whatever they want to.
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Major Major Major Major: Circularity ensues…
Major Major Major Major
@mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho)): if you say so.
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Major Major Major Major: You’re not really my immediate audience, kid.
Anyway, folks: Don’t allow yourselves to get herded. Yet Again.
Major Major Major Major
@mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho)): ok. Still got no idea what point you’re trying to make. Maybe your intended audience will be able to figure it out.
Another Scott
@mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho)): Popularity, and network effects, are a hell of a drug.
Cheers,
Scott.
mjl (formerly Judas Escargot (formerly, elsewhere, gaspacho))
@Another Scott: Wisdom.
Spider-Dan
@Bennett: Post.news is a service owned by a company, and therefore subject to the exact same kind of buyout that Elmo executed on Twitter. Fool me, can’t get fooled again.
All of the serious replacements for Twitter have to be open and out of the hands of any one entity. The techbros aren’t running out of money any time soon.
O. Felix Culpa
Late to the show, but saying that Dorsey is “only” a board member–out of three–and minority shareholder does not boost confidence. Boards have a LOT of power over organizational policy (that’s their job), and being one of three gives you a LOT of power on a board. Owning a significant chunk of stock, even in the minority, also gives you an elevated voice in an organization. So at minimum, Dorsey is not a non-factor in BlueSky’s governance, which folks may or may not want to take into consideration.
Lance
I requested an invite code months ago and never received one. Any idea why?
nickdag
This was a very useful primer. Thanks for putting it together!
Major Major Major Major
@Lance: the wait list has about two million people on it
Patricia
@Cathie from Canada: I think the reason for the limited number of users is that they are still in development. It’s a work in progress, being built and modified with user input. I’m in because my daughter’s partner is on the development team. It will be opened up to everyone eventually.