Bluesky, a trendy rival to X, finally opens to the public::undefined

  • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    66·
    1 year ago

    The guy who started Bluesky was the same Twitter co-founder who push for Twitter to sell out. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stick with Mastodon. It’s getting real comfy in there now.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Underneath, however, the company is building what Graber calls “an open, decentralized protocol” — a software system that allows developers and users to create their own versions of the social network, with their own rules and algorithms.

    Savvy social media users begged one another for “invite codes” to join the fledgling network, whose quirky first adopters gave it a vibe that some likened to the early days of Twitter.

    But with fewer than a dozen employees at the time, Graber put off a public launch, fearing that it would force the company to spend all its resources on maintaining and moderating the Bluesky network rather than building out the underlying “decentralized” system.

    Rose Wang, who oversees operations and strategy for Bluesky, said its goal is to combine the ease of use and shared experience of closed platforms like X and Threads with the user choice and openness of systems like Mastodon’s.

    Mike Masnick, editor of the blog Techdirt and a longtime tech analyst, has followed Bluesky’s progress from the start, after a paper he wrote helped to inspire Dorsey to create the project.

    Amy Zhang, a professor at University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has been researching Bluesky to study how users respond when given options to control their feeds and moderation systems.

    The original article contains 1,180 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • MusketeerX@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    I got an invite to join last year and signed up to test it out.

    Felt like there was a lot less people and a lot less content on it than Mastadon.

    Unless the users/content now really starts to take off, there’s not enough on there to make it interesting.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Every new social media site will start out like that, whether the platform itself is amazing or another corporate shithole.

  • Noxy@yiffit.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Put another way, the hype mechanism of “invite-only” stopped bringing enough hype to justify it.

    • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      ActivityPub is a w3c standard, which IMO is a big plus over nostr which doesn’t have an established independent steward for it.

      Also isn’t there the thing where users can’t really be banned on nostr? I’m not sure where I read that, but that’s going to kill any mass adoption if that’s the case.

        • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          I see what you’re saying about it not needing a standards body, and of course that can work fine, but for me it’s an advantage that AP is maintained by a body independent from any specific implementation. An equivalent would be if the AP spec was defined by the Mastodon devs and community—not a bad thing, just not as good in my mind.

          The relays thing I think was what the unable to really ban comes from. Are there moderation tools to propagate bans across relays quickly? Does nostr have the same issues as with lemmy instances where an admin abandons the relay and it gets overrun with shit? Some users need to be booted off the network entirely and swiftly sometimes, we’ve seen several cases of this in Lemmy already with users posting horrendous shit. I’d be concerned that one of my relays would lag on banning (timezone differences for moderators or whatever innocuous reason) and these users achieve their goal of more people seeing the shit they post. For some people this might trigger PTSD, which is why I say it would be a huge barrier to mass adoption until that issue is resolved.

          The user portability aspect is the main advantage of it that I can see, and it looks like a pretty clever solution to the issue. Though personally speaking, I only really care about my subscription list, which I sync between two accounts already using my lemmy client. I understand some people might care more about the other stuff though (particularly on microblog platforms)

            • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Fair play, regarding the tooling being there then, I had the impression it wasn’t even possible currently. I guess I’d now wonder how ubiquitous its usage is.

              My concern with your second part is that law enforcement would not be able to quickly deal with the issue and in the case of an abandoned relay, could take a fair few days or weeks before any action is taken. The problems with such illegal content is that in many places even unwittingly having it in your browser cache would put you massively at risk—it needs to be removed and the user prevented from continuing as immediately as possible, anything else puts the people using the network at risk. If such a risk exists, it’s going to put most people off (and entirely understandably). I know I avoided browsing lemmy for a fair while when the problem here was still being figured out, and I thankfully never saw anything, but I’m still weary of browsing on my lunch break at work for example.

              Also FWIW, I think Google does scan emails and drive for this stuff, I think all US based social networks have an obligation to do so also, IIRC, but I might not be 100% correct on that.

    • asudox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Nostr, is in fact platforms using Nostr as its protocol to communicate with each other. You see, ‘Nostr’ is just the protocol. But when you add the wide range of available clients, it becomes a fully functional fediverse. So, it’s more fittingly dubbed clients powered by Nostr!