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Eugen Rochko

Even two years on, I still have no idea which direction #Bluesky is intending to go. Though it seems like if they wanted to adopt an existing protocol, they would've already done so.

I'll only say that the challenges of building a decentralized social network are anywhere but the actual protocol. Mastodon started on one protocol, then switched to another. Decisions that matter are in product design. Marketing.

If they propose a new protocol, what would make it worth resetting all that to zero?

19 comments
Andy

@Gargron well, the entire thing was a marketing effect for Twitter, trying to play into the hands of the things that managed to pull away a chunk of users from the site.

I'm not part of the communities, but considering even document-wise nothing has happened in the past 8 months it is pretty clear that the decentralization is not an effort Twitter is working towards.

Григорий Клюшников

I started Smithereen in autumn of 2019. Bluesky started around first half of 2020. After all this time, and considering my extreme laziness, I have something resembling an actual product. It works, I'm writing this comment from it. What do they have after 2+ years? A bunch of promises and nothing material.

:umu: :umu:
@grishka @Gargron I lold at how they hired ipfs devs for that.

If you don't know ipfs allows to share files in decentralized manner but it sucks. Even if the origin is online, you may have random errors trying to fetch files from it.

In fact ipfs without web gateways is absolutely impossible to use.
Григорий Клюшников

a1ba-nyan, but it's p2p, and unfortunately, in many people's minds, decentralized means p2p and nothing else.

:umu: :umu:
@grishka @Gargron yes, the p2p part works fine. But the actual file fetching is not.
:umu: :umu:
@grishka @Gargron well... anyway, I believe they will show something but it will be born dead.

Because they don't want decentralization, let alone federation. They have twitter size budgets to absorb.
Григорий Клюшников

a1ba-nyan, twitter's actions don't make sense to me, they don't align with their own vision. In the same 2 years they've been talking about decentralization/federation, they've rolled out the new web version that's full of forced recommendations and dark patterns, and they keep adding new ones, too. And what's the deal with opening up the API Jack promised? Why is it taking so long?

𝓻𝓻𝓪

@Gargron

My thinking is that blue sky exists for Twitter to:

- relieve regulatory pressures in the context of EU's DMA or US-based regulatory efforts with regards to online platforms. ("look we're trying, don't fine us!")

- be able to set the agenda wrt interoperability when and if it ever comes to enforcement of DMA or US-based efforts ("actually, we should do it our way!")

- aquihire talent of emerging decentralized competitors ("hey @Gargron want to be paid to work on the future of decentralized social media?")

- keep a lot of people busy in a controlled opposition

- preposition to do a classic Embrace Extend Extinguish (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,)

None of these are explicit goals of course, but they are too advantageous side-effects to ignore and it would be naive to give companies that size any benefit of the doubt.

@Gargron

My thinking is that blue sky exists for Twitter to:

- relieve regulatory pressures in the context of EU's DMA or US-based regulatory efforts with regards to online platforms. ("look we're trying, don't fine us!")

- be able to set the agenda wrt interoperability when and if it ever comes to enforcement of DMA or US-based efforts ("actually, we should do it our way!")

Lutin Discret

@Gargron I gave up on #Bluesky: the discord is just hundreds of idling crytpobros randomly typing "token when?"

I've built a matrix community that gather people who want to build the future of social media.

The matrix space gather ~30 projects based on #ActivityPub, the #SecureScuttleButt projects, some social networks based on other protocols: #twtxt, #XMPP, #solid and #Matrix and other projects like @ohn and bluesky

I hope people who want to build things will find like-minded people there 🤞

Григорий Клюшников

Lutin Discret, I tried to be a member of their discord community, but it got really boring after I had to get those crypto-minded people down to earth a third time in a row. Like they keep insisting that you absolutely need a form of identity that's completely decentralized and doesn't depend even on DNS. Then they get confused when you ask them about what happens when someone loses their private key or leaks it. All the while for me a system that doesn't offer definitive answers to these questions simply can not exist at any scale exceeding a small group of enthusiasts. Oh and of course they want to reinvent the networking/transport layer too, because clearly TCP/HTTP/TLS is just not trendy enough.

Lutin Discret, I tried to be a member of their discord community, but it got really boring after I had to get those crypto-minded people down to earth a third time in a row. Like they keep insisting that you absolutely need a form of identity that's completely decentralized and doesn't depend even on DNS. Then they get confused when you ask them about what happens when someone loses their private key or leaks it. All the while for me a system that doesn't offer definitive answers to these questions...

stn 🇺🇦

@Gargron I saw a rumor somewhere that they're supposedly adopting Matrix to build it, but I have zero idea where that came from. But I would 100% expect them to embrace/extend/extinguish some existing protocol (hello XMPP and Messenger/Google Chat/etc etc)

Adamas Nemesis

@Gargron Indeed. Bluesky should just adopt ActivityPub and be done with it.

clacke: looking for something 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
They may end up reusing ActivityStreams for parts that just need a vocabulary, any vocabulary, for social interactions, and parts of ActivityPub adapted to whatever substrate they'll come up with instead of HTTP+DNS.

Kind of like what Zot/6 did with ActivityStreams+Pub, but in whatever direction BlueSky think they need to take this.
Malcolm Bastien

@Gargron I'd like to see less "designing the perfect system for one day maybe" and more adoption of Matrix and Mastodon as "the best options available today"

People will agree and say "Things should be distributed" on their Twitter account or on Discord but they won't say "...but right now, today, you can go and create an account on Mastodon."

Rysiekúr Memesson 🇺🇦

@Gargron the aim of BlueSky seems to be to create a decentralized, federated social network that is controlled and monetized by a single entity.

In other words, to square a circle.

So this is going exactly as well as could be expected. 😉

clacke: looking for something 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
Nobody with billions of USD in cash and 200 million active users to leverage is starting from scratch.

Product design and marketing are trivial compared to figuring out what BlueSky is supposed to be good for.

I think the endgame for Twitter is to be able to have 200 million monetizable active users and at the same time be able to say that if you talk to some who advocates genocide they can say it's not their fault because it's decentralized and they're a common carrier.
Nobody with billions of USD in cash and 200 million active users to leverage is starting from scratch.

Product design and marketing are trivial compared to figuring out what BlueSky is supposed to be good for.
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