[stevebmark]

I believe the Bluesky experiment is already over, and it was not successful.

1. Bluesky was advertised as a very open, resilient platform because of AT, impossible to fully censor, with moderation at the user level, not platform level. In reality, "Bluesky Social" is what everyone uses (not AT), which performs bans at the core levels (PDS / Relay / user account level). So it's just like any other social media platform. Still better than the Mastodon Reddit-style mod abuse problem, but not fundamentally more open than other social media platforms.

2. The second promise is that if anyone hosts their own PDS, anyone else can build their own relay and their own social media app that gets around the bans. In reality, I don't see much appetite for using someone else's distributed key-value JSON schema design. The value add isn't clear enough. Other social media platforms build their own systems, which is an intuitively natural choice.

If Bluesky is not a highly open platform, and AT has low adoption (no killer app, hasn't realized the promise/benefit of being able to aggregate data from multiple publishers) then I don't think it has a future.

[erlend_sh]

Seems rather premature to call the experiment over when Bluesky/atproto has only been generally available for a year since they opened up registrations to all in February 2024. That’s a very short amount of time to explore the affordances of a brand new platform and ecosystem.

A couple days ago one of the most prominent alt-networks in the ATmosphere, Blacksky, received a $30k dev grant: https://bsky.app/profile/rudyfraser.com/post/3lk6gfblhdk2b

In a week from now the first ever atproto-specific conference of its scale will be taking place: https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf/

[janandonly]

The development of that other protocol that was also blessed with a money injection from Jack, is NOSTR.

This protocol and all the clients and relays went the full decentralized route. This had up and downsides. Not all clients support all features. Not all relays support all features, and the quality between these apps is greatly differing.

But the upside is: the development is truly decentralized. Nobody is in control and every developer chooses which of the many NIP (Nostr improvement proposals) they want to incorporate or ignore.

Off course, most users will just use the most popular clients (like https://primal.net/home and https://damus.io) but simply thaking your crypographic keys and moving clients, or using a whole bunch of clients next to each other, is just such a vastly better experience then logging on to one platform, either BlueSky or X.

[sam_lowry_]

NIPs feels a lot like XMPP XEPs )

[skybrian]

Why should the experiment be considered over? It seems like there's still work in progress? Is there something preventing a "killer app" from becoming popular someday soon?

[est]

bluesky has a very bright future because x.com sucks more.

Sometimes you don't have to excel at everything, just be better than your competitors.

[stevebmark]

Bluesky is currently a terrible product with a paltry number of users. The small dev team can’t compete with social media platform features. React Native means bad mobile UX.

[galactus]

“In reality, I don't see much appetite for using someone else's distributed key-value JSON schema design. The value add isn't clear enough.”

the value is that you’d start with an already existing full network of users

[numpad0]

I think a response to this comment have to be built on two axes:

1. Is the anything goes Happy Hour of Bluesky over?

2. Is the remnant of happy hour useful?

And, IMO, the answer to both are yes. I bet it'll coast for a decade or two and I bet it'll do tolerably; the social media wing of The Internet was given an gratuitous 1UP.

[jchw]

I'm of two minds about this. I don't really hold a super high opinion of Jack Dorsey, but regarding why he left Bluesky I think he actually had a point. It's not really clear what Bluesky actually practically does other than directly compete with Twitter.

The thing that steams my rice personally is that I am friends and acquaintances with a variety of different folks who use social media. I don't think Bluesky would have seen nearly as much adoption if it didn't position itself as having solutions to the inherent problems of centralized social media: the same promises are what propelled growth on Mastodon, too. But see, even though Mastodon is flawed in many ways, it really does solve some of the problems of centralized social media. It lacks some of the theoretical capabilities that Bluesky and AT proto offer, and I absolutely think what Bluesky and AT proto offer on paper is amazing. Censorship resistance! Host your own PDS! Relays keep working when PDSes go down! Sounds good, whereas on Mastodon your identity is tied to where your data is hosted and there's nothing good to do when an instance goes down. However... In practice, none of it matters because indeed, AT proto adoption seems rather unimpressive. The Bluesky app view offering a single URL regardless of where the data is hosted is great, but... In practice, it centralizes all of the moderation for all users. The way Bluesky operates today makes it more like Twitter with extra steps. And knowing some of the moderation woes, I'm not sure I'd categorize Bluesky as unilaterally better than Mastodon; in my opinion, the main advantage of Bluesky over Mastodon here is the lack of instance-level blocks, which I think are grossly overused in the fediverse. OTOH, though, the ability to choose an instance means you do have a choice, however inconvenient it is. Bluesky having one appview, there is one choice. You get to see what they let you.

They built something impressive, and sure, it has its fans, but I worry it attracted people under somewhat dubious pretenses. It wasn't really decentralized in any meaningful way when users originally flooded in, and to this day the actual degree to which it is decentralized is quite questionable. I understand they have valid reason to fear giving up control in any truly meaningful way, but if they can't actually do that, then is there really a point to this? In practice, if Bluesky was completely centralized, it would basically make no difference. It wouldn't change much about moderation or how censorship-resistant Bluesky is, or any of that. It'd probably just make the damn thing a lot less operationally complex, and it would effectively be Twitter but for people who are left-leaning.

Thankfully for me, I don't really want any particular Twitter-like, but it's still hard to deny the importance of Twitter. A lot of the internet's personalities and creative talents are hanging out on these crappy social media platforms. I have my misgivings with the Fediverse, I've written at length about it in the past... But if I had to pick one, right now I'd pick the Fediverse over AT proto, scale be damned, subreddit moderator problems be damned, because it offers practically useful decentralization today and not "maybe some day."

[makopoison12]

Instances are inherently centralised, what real decentralisation is offered?

[CSSer]

> AT has low adoption

This is the clear and present problem in my eyes. I disagree with your first premise. I feel like it's unfair to call it over and unsuccessful. Many people are investing directly in the problem we're discussing. It's my hope this is the core focus of everyone working on AT at the moment: incentivizing some kind of competition in the ecosystem and creating and actively demonstrating that value add. Many want Bluesky to be viable because the alternative publishing platform is a dumpster fire. However, it's only fair to admit this doesn't magically make it so. I'd really like to see some more concrete details on how they plan to generate revenue.

[edoceo]

How many systems did SMTP start with? Maybe (hopefully?) AT just needs more time for more implementations to emerge?