Unnecessary, pointless, expensive features are precisely how you define the inverse of the original Twitter vision.
Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)
Identity management is the biggest issue with social media. I'm on mastodon, but my "identity" is tied directly to the server instance that I'm on. If something happens to that server instance then I'm basically losing my "identity". If my "identity" was tied to a domain I owned then keeping it would be as simple as changing a few DNS settings. I don't know enough about Bluesky to say if it's actually going to be an interesting decentralized platform, or if it's another social media run by a tech billionaire, but having domain names be the basis for your "identity" seems like the biggest revolution in that space.
I think that we absolutely need more of this as this gives the users ownership over their identity. Right now, if the New York Times wants to get verified on social media they rely on the platform to do so. With this it would be their own choice.
Actually, bluesky has supported custom domains since the very beginning (the Namecheap deal is the part of this story that is actually new/noteworthy) and it is very widely-used. I am unsure what % of active users are using their own domain, but it is not insignificant.
The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
Engineers and designers and PMs are so smart and experienced and so eager to show each other how good at their job they are.
Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope.
Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
I wouldn't say it's unnecessary. Owning your identity is the worst problem in modern social networking. You have one identity. You. The idea you need to keep registering, providing emails, phones to everyone, picking usernames (often different) which can be impersonated, in order to create account which then can be banned at whim by private company moderators and so on... this is not the way.
I don't know if domains are the way either, but at least they're a name reservation system that's established and works. At the current price of a domain, it comes down to $1 a month, which is a great value if you can use it to identify yourself with, authenticate, authorize and own your own digital identity.
It can also be cheaper, because if this is a mass service for every person out there, scale will reduce some of the cost.
I must say, the number of people in here saying bluesky is dead because of Threads' overnight growth is surprising and upsetting. Believing all that matters is how fast they get users is hugely missing the point. Bluesky has been taking their time in order to get things right--and getting certain things right is very important. Twitter already exists; we need alternatives because things were handled wrong.
For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many/most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight.
Crowning whichever one can "move faster and break things" as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms.
Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.
IMO social media websites lives or dies by network effect
if threads get hundred million people in a short period and they start to write and interact with each other then that a good moat for them.
Might be that BlueSky is not trying to be a popular social media platform. But if they want to then having right now their signup closed is a very bad decision.
It is already hard to keep track of where each discussion is: twitter, mastodon, instagram, facebook, linkedin ...
I think people are maybe trying one more from what they currently have.
look at Clubhouse - they tried the invitation idea and died with it in their hands. When having so many platforms available almost no one waits for yet another one for 3 months to get their handle to finally talk with 10%of their existing network as their other 90% still waits their invitation.
Calling early winners is a longstanding pastime of tech...the Internet protocol stack was the dark horse candidate in telecom circles back in the 80's. Apple was "done for" in the mid-90's, in the same boat as Commodore, Atari and all the rest.
The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.
I have come to realise that sometimes you should just miss the forest for the trees. Because without the trees there will be no forest and. A social network is the forest.
> For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users.
So the old Slashdot moderation system, only with multiple layers?
I can’t wait to read the tell all book about Bluesky during this three day period when Threads hits a hundred million users and Bluesky makes the most important strategic decision of its existence.
This is the type of feature / partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch.
Wouldn't it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?
Seems like identity management is at the core of what Bluesky is trying to change. Twitter managing verification of accounts makes it harder to not be seen as an endorsement of some degree. With this system, Bluesky doesn’t need to verify @iphone, when Apple can just create @iphone.apple.com. It’s pretty central to their identity management and verification. Having it in year 5 is like not having it at all.
Looks great. But maybe the effort should be going towards scaling up so they can remove the invite only requirement, Threads is going to actively eat Bluesky’s lunch while it remains.
The dirty little secret about Bluesky is that it's actually pretty goddamn great on the inside. I have never in my life had normals asking for a social media invite, but I currently have a list of fourteen people waiting for a code.
It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot.
Well Threads currently doesn’t even have a chronological, non-algo feed I can look at, whereas on bluesky you can have any number of feeds with whatever algo/logic you want. I don’t think I’ll be using Threads much while the one and only feed is the way it is.
And there’s more differences than just that, it’s a bit too soon to do a declaration of death I think
> They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.
I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
I will never even consider using threads, because I will never use Instagram/Facebook. Even Twitter I only reluctantly had an account to follow specific individuals for information. I have a mastodon account but I don’t like it very much.
I will wait to try Bluesky. If it dies before I get the chance, then I won’t be using anything at all. Threads is not an option.
It might not be dead, but it has definitely dropped the ball.
My timeline on Bsky somehow always show people taking a dig at other rivals, and self congratulations. People regularly diss twitter, Mastodon and now the feed is full of people dissing on Threads. This bsky-is-not-twitter identity that bsky network latches onto will be detrimental to itself.
Also there are no federated servers anywhere in sight so far.
None of them feel special, they all feel like the same thing. I still think there’s something else out there that will sneak up and take the short form social crown. At least I hope there is.
Lot of negative comments here but IMO this is huge. The best way to keep anything commercial good in the long term is competition, and the only way to have competition with web services is if users can go somewhere else, which requires a portable identity/username and open protocols. Bluesky is currently the only platform offering both in a convenient package. Even Mastodon doesn't make it this easy[0].
Ideologically these Twitter exodus communities will become even more microcosmic than the presumed "alt-right, redpilled" ideology they purport to escape. Twitter may be these things in part, but by being a direct reaction away from these things, the new networks will become necessarily more niche and specialized ideologically.
In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the "correctness" of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the "town square" functionality which is core to these platforms' ethos.
It is fine, there's a huge diversity in social media right now. I don't think Bluesky has a good narrative for any particular kind of user. I don't think it's going to hit cozy web status being an open air massively global network. The hallmark of the cozy web is a mix of private/semi-open/actually niche communities.
Bluesky is going down the VC path, and we all know how this ends ups for social media companies. Sure, they'll try to monetize without ads. But it's unclear to me what kind of revenue stream would generate enough cash. Sure as hell it won't be this Namecheap thing.
In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.
Namecheap is the worst company possible for this, because it's trivial to trick them into removing domains. Here's a reminder that a troll managed to get them to remove domains, through Twitter, by claiming that they were run by Russians.
Could you back that up? The irony of anyone accepting that Namecheap fell for a "trust me bro" with a source of "trust me bro" is funny, but I'd also like to read more
I don't understand the emphasis on "identity management" or "account portability". It has from the beginning been the single justification I have heard from the atproto people for reinventing the ActivityPub wheel.
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
Could be a huge boon to the self-hosted movement, might reach the critical mass of users that are willing to fund open source development of self-hosted cloud, just BYO domain
i've been following art communities on twitter, and while threads have indeed taken off massively, there's still a surprising amount of interest on bluesky, and there are people who are joining both, even after threads' opening up. there are several anecdotes of people not liking threads because of its corporate cleanliness.
so no, bluesky isn't as dead as you may think. if anything it's gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.
I just want auto-renew to work properly sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, lost a couple of high value domain names even tho they've had my CC for years.
I once let my Hotmail account go 30 or 90 days without a login, so Microsoft followed their policy to delete my email and open the username to the public. Someone saw my email on dns records, found it was available, registered the email and stole my domain.
Extremely bitter about that ~17 years later. Extremely.
It is always a little bit bizarre to see things like this. Domains are generally for organisations, for good reason: they cost money to acquire, they're globally unique, and they cost money to run.
Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that.
I'd argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we're part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the "domain administrators" and the people who associate with them.
The right answer isn't to atomise identity (that's technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation's board, committees, or key executive positions.
We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.
[+] [-] elif|2 years ago|reply
Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)
[+] [-] devjab|2 years ago|reply
I think that we absolutely need more of this as this gives the users ownership over their identity. Right now, if the New York Times wants to get verified on social media they rely on the platform to do so. With this it would be their own choice.
[+] [-] dkh|2 years ago|reply
The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
[+] [-] belugacat|2 years ago|reply
Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope.
Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
[+] [-] manojlds|2 years ago|reply
Lot of feedback originally was common people won't bother to buy domain and integrate with BlueSky, so this is great that they are doing this.
[+] [-] 3cats-in-a-coat|2 years ago|reply
I don't know if domains are the way either, but at least they're a name reservation system that's established and works. At the current price of a domain, it comes down to $1 a month, which is a great value if you can use it to identify yourself with, authenticate, authorize and own your own digital identity.
It can also be cheaper, because if this is a mass service for every person out there, scale will reduce some of the cost.
[+] [-] dkh|2 years ago|reply
For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many/most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight.
Crowning whichever one can "move faster and break things" as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms.
Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.
[+] [-] gls2ro|2 years ago|reply
if threads get hundred million people in a short period and they start to write and interact with each other then that a good moat for them.
Might be that BlueSky is not trying to be a popular social media platform. But if they want to then having right now their signup closed is a very bad decision.
It is already hard to keep track of where each discussion is: twitter, mastodon, instagram, facebook, linkedin ...
I think people are maybe trying one more from what they currently have.
look at Clubhouse - they tried the invitation idea and died with it in their hands. When having so many platforms available almost no one waits for yet another one for 3 months to get their handle to finally talk with 10%of their existing network as their other 90% still waits their invitation.
[+] [-] syntheweave|2 years ago|reply
The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciabattabread|2 years ago|reply
So the old Slashdot moderation system, only with multiple layers?
[+] [-] fnord77|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanmoran|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacurtis|2 years ago|reply
This is the type of feature / partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch.
Wouldn't it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?
[+] [-] eddythompson80|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afavour|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpwerty|2 years ago|reply
It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot.
Threads is not an equivalent product.
[+] [-] nba456_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prakhar897|2 years ago|reply
Nobody is going to move again. They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.
Whatever they release now, will never get initial users to get it off ground.
[+] [-] dkh|2 years ago|reply
And there’s more differences than just that, it’s a bit too soon to do a declaration of death I think
[+] [-] lapcat|2 years ago|reply
I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
[+] [-] rychco|2 years ago|reply
I will wait to try Bluesky. If it dies before I get the chance, then I won’t be using anything at all. Threads is not an option.
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|2 years ago|reply
My timeline on Bsky somehow always show people taking a dig at other rivals, and self congratulations. People regularly diss twitter, Mastodon and now the feed is full of people dissing on Threads. This bsky-is-not-twitter identity that bsky network latches onto will be detrimental to itself.
Also there are no federated servers anywhere in sight so far.
[+] [-] covercash|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderspitman|2 years ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
[+] [-] elif|2 years ago|reply
In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the "correctness" of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the "town square" functionality which is core to these platforms' ethos.
[+] [-] coderintherye|2 years ago|reply
Threads for the status-seekers Spill for hip folks Truth Social for alt-right Bluesky for the cozy web Mastodon for the true geeks
So on and so on...and that's a good thing.
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klysm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shafyy|2 years ago|reply
In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.
[+] [-] DoItToMe81|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 65|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beepbooptheory|2 years ago|reply
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
[+] [-] vermilingua|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponorin|2 years ago|reply
so no, bluesky isn't as dead as you may think. if anything it's gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.
[+] [-] latenightcoding|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|2 years ago|reply
Extremely bitter about that ~17 years later. Extremely.
[+] [-] wahahah|2 years ago|reply
You can also add funds to your account in advance, just got an email suggesting that for an upcoming renewal.
[+] [-] hkt|2 years ago|reply
Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that.
I'd argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we're part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the "domain administrators" and the people who associate with them.
The right answer isn't to atomise identity (that's technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation's board, committees, or key executive positions.
We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.