I wish Bluesky would finally announce how they plan to monetise it all. It feels like things are stuck in-between trying to be “open to the community”, gather developer momentum around ATProto, the promise of decentralisation and independence… and the unknowns of their roadmap ahead?
It’s all very nicely written but the risk of committing oneself (as a user, as a developer, as a social/marketing person, etc) only to get surprised by what/how they generate profit from is just unsettling.
I believe this isn't as much of a problem as it appears to be at first glance because of the scale of social apps like Bluesky.
For example, Wikipedia generates >$180M/yr just by running ads for itself requesting donations. Requesting donations is the least effective monetizing strategy and yet it still works because of scale.
Donations would probably work but Bluesky has additional options. They could create a premium app for power users that just adds nice-to-have features (which may cost real money to provide and maintain), they can resell domain names, they can sell merch, etc.
Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars to be highly sustainable and profitable. It was built and scaled with fewer than 20 full time employees.
The most important and most difficult part is getting to sufficient scale, and that's mostly a matter of just making the app even better than it is today.
1. I believe they actually could generate (low) billions of dollars without compromising at all, if they manage to reach true mainstream scale (>1 billion MAUs)
2. I really don't care if the investors/shareholders are disappointed as long as the PBC's mission is fulfilled. Also their control is relatively limited.
Maybe I should have written added this:
Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Bluesky Social, PBC (former employee)
Yeah, that’s more of a hope about the future. It’s up to other people to build it.
I’ve seen posts about some poorly-publicized, proof-of-concept alternative implementations that would probably fall over if they got real attention, but I think that shows that it’s not a problem with the protocol itself.
Good enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just about posting comments on the Internet, not bank accounts. If something went fatally wrong, we would move again, just like we moved off previous social networks.
It’s also possible to run an annual event that makes a profit. Which might be something a social network could figure out.
The first club I belonged to as a teenager worked this way. In lieu of high membership dues there was volunteer time spent helping out at or before the event. I was surprised as an adult to learn that some events lose money or only break even.
AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.
I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.
Bluesky is built on atproto, which is designed to be "locked open" in a way that can't be rescinded. That was a core design constraint.
VCs funded Netscape which did more than any other company to launch the web and they made a lot of money without having to destroy the ideals of the web.
The PDSes (personal data servers) can be independantly hosted, but Bluesky itself indexes and presents the messages these servers contain in their social-app. Bluesky also maintains the directory of these servers.
Yes, and running these things is prohibitively difficult such as I've only witnessed two full index attempts and no alternative plc directories.
Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.
AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve
If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.
If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.
Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.
I agree there's a lot of room for improvement in making it easier.
But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.
The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.
hundreds (thousands?) of users have signed up for Bluesky Social, then moved their accounts to independent hosts. folks can use https://zeppelin.social/ as a totally free-standing bluesky posting experience that interoperates with the full network.
Bluesky Social still clearly dominates the ecosystem, but there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.
Do you disagree? Is there a specific centralized component you take issue with?
> there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.
Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?
Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.
Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?
Yes, all of those social graph relationships are hinged off a permanent identifier (DID) and everything comes along when accounts migrate PDS instances. Folks can use zeppelin.social from any PDS instance. The DID PLC directory is currently hosted by Bluesky, but the directory can be forked, and did:web identifiers can be used as an alternative (and several independence-minded folks in the network do so).
Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.
Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.
> Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.
I totally agree. However, a lot of people in the fediverse/ActivityPub world apparently (?) disagree, seeing as your domain is tightly coupled to your server, i.e. no name portability. Seems like a wild oversight to me, and getting massive instances like matrix.org and mastadon.social seems like an inevitable consequence.
Lack of name portability implies greater risk when choosing a server. Greater risk when choosing a server means choosing comparatively less risky servers. Choosing comparatively less risky servers means choosing more well-known servers. Thus you have the GMail-ification of the fediverse.
Even if set aside the details on dependence on bluesky infrastructure, the effort to host “all components” is quite expensive and technology-intensive with significant cost for storage and compute. For example, a deployment of “all the things” (just for you) is in the ballpark of 70-100€/month because the way things are designed to work. And that’s not even factoring the burden of managing the whole range of technologies involved.
Making it hard to setup or run, complex to understand or change are also forms of discouraging independent use.
Same, that’s why I said “the promise of”. Also how do they plan to bill actors in this decentralised system? Is it going to be developers footing the bill? Some premium features only “the main Bluesky instance” has? It’s not clear to me at all.
Their uncertainty is magnified on the outside tbh. e.g. There are other things at play that can (probably will) cost a lot of money. The protocol (ATProto) they’re developing and advocating as a “platform”.
Say I’m building a cool app around that, how do I plan how much is this going to cost me and can I stomach the risk of binding myself to this “supposedly open” platform without knowing how it will work in 6 months?
The best way to think about it is to assume you'll want to leave someday, and you'll be going to whichever is the best of the choices at that future time that are early enough to be years away from needing to monetize.
Don't let yourself get attached to any one place. That's the lesson. Staying ahead of monetization is the move. Nothing will stay good forever.
My guess is, they're going to have to be okay with only reaching break-even or slightly over. That's the point, after all. If you're dissatisfied with how any of these decentralized protocol platforms are running things, you're technically free to start your own, and plenty of people have.
It's not the fault of BlueSky or their users, but I really haven't enjoyed the social media climate right now. If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y. For some subjects that is BlueSky and for others it would be platforms I don't want to participate in.
I think the reality is that most social media platforms will inevitability create hyper-polarized audiences that do little more than generate content.
I'd actually argue against this. although I'd probably blame Reddit more.
It is now normal for social media to be composed of echo chambers and that's because administrations and users enable and seek that. If someone's to blame more than Twitter/Reddit and their respective users I'm missing it, and on that note, blocklists as a functionality in BlueSky are there precisely to protect echo chambers.
The hyper-polarization is probably preventable, in my estimation. The main thing a social network would need to do is to stymy the flywheel effect that allows a handful of users (and thus sets of norms) to come to dominate so strongly. That might mean something along the lines of a system that puts a hard cap on the reach any profile or topic can have, and when engagement exceeds the triggering threshold, reach actually tapers off proportionate to how far the threshold is exceeded.
In theory this would naturally elevate posts that are more measured and mundane while sinking posts with big emotional lizard brain appeal (by design or otherwise). With time this would establish a self-reinforcing norm that makes polarized and inflammatory posts look as clownish as they actually are.
A recent study[1] seems to indicate that polarization is a hard problem, along with some of the other negative effects of social media. Many of the commonly suggested solutions have minimal impact, or no effect at all. That flywheel effect is surprisingly robust.
I saw that, but the approach taken is questionable (do LLMs represent realistic behavior for scenarios they’ve not been trained for?) and it also doesn’t seem like anything like my suggestions here were tested. It’s better than nothing, but far from conclusive in my opinion.
I think it’s more about not taking posts out of context. Communities need boundaries between them. Substack and other blogging tools are good this way.
For Bluesky, the problem is that the replies to someone you follow can be pretty bad. (Official Bluesky posts are an example of this.) People can filter them individually, but it’s not the same as a blog with good moderation.
I don’t think I could do a whole lot if the replies to one of my Bluesky posts were bad?
But blocking on Bluesky works better than it did on Twitter. If you post a crummy reply to me and I block you, nobody sees your reply. There are a few other small differences between Bluesky and Twitter that really do a lot to cut down on the pile-on effect that’s common at Twitter.
I think a lot of social network problems would be solved if platforms put an orange flag next to profiles that have posted more than 10 times in the last 24 hours, and a red flag next to profiles that have posted more than 60 times in the last 7 days. The total number of flags ever given to an account on the bio would be good as well. No other automatic action, just a visible flag or other symbol.
Being able to temporarily filter out profiles that post too many times (a setting you could change) would also be nice, but it shouldn't be automatic.
It’s somebody’s side-thing, I think and not official Bluesky, but yes, that’s become my primary feed for Bluesky. Following is my secondary and I almost never look at discover or popular with friends.
Not a bad idea. It may also be good to distinguish replies and reposts from unique timeline posts, with “reply guys” consistently being some of the most notorious individuals.
> stymy the flywheel effect that allows a handful of users (and thus sets of norms) to come to dominate so strongly
This prevents certain communities from forming and certain topics from being discussed. For example, you can't discuss LGBTQ issues with troll armies constantly swarming and spamming. If such communities are not given tools to exclude malignant disruptors by setting norms and "dominating" a given channel, they will have to go elsewhere (such as leaving X for BlueSky).
This system wouldn’t work in place of moderation, but rather alongside it. The two would have an enhancing effect on each other:
- Reach limits greatly limit troll effectiveness, since they can’t find each other as easily
- Posts that exceed the threshold naturally vs. being trolled past would have different “fingerprints” that could be used like a blacklight for troll detection for both assisting moderators and for model training for automatic suspected troll flagging
The threshold should probably be dynamic and set at the point at which posts “breach containment” (escape from their intended audience), which is where problems tend to occur.
Bluesky-like self-moderation controls would also help.
moderation inevitably leads to exclusion- just look at the US state specific subreddits that are moderated by radicals who prohibit even the slightest deviation from their views which silences dissent. This one-sided viewpoint is then slurped up and used to train AI models in a kind of gross feedback loop
Reddit’s fatal flaw is that subreddit mods are volunteers. Sometimes this works well when you get a knowledgable, benevolent individual in the position, but more often than not you get people who want to power trip.
Mods should be in-house, on payroll, and strictly bound to the network’s standards.
This should generally be less of an issue anyway in a system that actively penalizes the sorts of crudely expressed, un-nuanced posts that are typically social media’s bread and butter. Not being able to appeal to basal emotions (“it feels right” is a poor metric) and being required to substantiate views more intelligently takes the air out of a lot of fringe sails.
As always, there's a balance. Communities (and individuals) generally need the ability to moderate and manage access to both membership and interactions with the community. Algorithmic-driven open platforms are sorta mutually incompatible with that idea
I think that Twitter (and by extension, Bluesky) is designed in such a way that it promotes hostility and division. You can't really have a good discussion when the format makes people limit their posting to super short messages; it means people just dump hot takes on each other and wind up shouting past each other. So in that sense I certainly would call it the platforms' fault. Twitter (and Bluesky/Mastodon) are toxic to our society and we would be far better off if they were never created.
There's a lot of hot tub parties out there. Some have people you want I really want to interact with, some do not. Some have good house rules making it feel comfortable, some do not.
The best part of BlueSky in my opinion is that it's really easy to control what you want to see, without the site-owner's algorithm choosing for you. No matter who else is at the hot tub party, I don't have to worry much about them peeing in my particular hot tub. I hear Mastodon is somewhat similar, but it's been a while.
The balance between discovery and curation and control is nigh-on perfect for me in BlueSky. If I want to focus just on my corner of the science world, it's super easy for me to build a network of people just in that corner and not get spammed with, say, racially-tinged fight videos that are meant for engagement bait, as has happened on other social networks.
If you want hyper-polarized communities, some of those can be found on BlueSky too! But at least on BlueSky I'm able to choose what I want rather than having the preferences of the site owner control my information environment.
> If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y.
To me, this is the crux of your problem. Social media is like a, well, social space like a bar. Not everyone shares the same opinions, but most of the patrons can at least agree enough to not fight each other, which is sort of an echo chamber since yelling something against the grain would get your ask kicked in a bar.
Forums are the place to have a discussion about subject X, since everyone is there to have that discussion. Of course, if you get off topic or snippy the conversation may devolve, but if you stay on topic you can have a nice conversation about subject X.
For all that it sounds unlikely, it'd be nice if the blogosphere, with blog replies and pingbacks, could come back for this sort of discussion. No monetization, though, so substack and co. are out.
What, in your opinion, is wrong with a bit of monetization?
I know it can produce some posts of less value, but it also pulls the blogger back in and allows professionals in certain areas to not feel they give put high quality out there for absolutely nothing.
I just mean, I can see the pros, but not really serious cons, so I'm wondering what your take is?
I left X because of how bad it got but BlueSky is also quite often useless in terms of good discussion. Recently any substack article posted is just filled with comments about how using substack supports Nazi ideology, no other discussion to be had. When it comes to anything related to AI the comments are all about stealing from artists. It is as if people just wait for the right buzzword to appear and post their canned response. Interesting posts that don't cause any controversy just don't have much engagement.
The same trend is noticeable here on HN. Many threads are full of top-level posts that are just someone pattern-matching on a word they don't like in the headline and using it as an excuse to vent about whatever their pet issue is. Usually posts like that are magnets for zero-effort "me too"s and similar. Sometimes interesting discussions happen deeper in the threads, but it's disappointingly rare. It's really sad watching the entire internet turn into this, and I can't help but feel like places like Twitter/X and Bluesky are the source.
My qualms with Bluesky has less to do with ideological leanings (it’s true that there are ethics implications that a lot of people like to sweep under the rug and that should be pointed out) and more with how depressing it is to use, with an overwhelming sentiment of doom.
I’m not going to bury my head in the sand and pretend everything is just peachy (it’s not) but the doomerism is so strong and pervasive that I think it breeds complacency that when met with the sugar high of social media engagement reacts to form armchair activism (which breeds yet more complacency). All that time and energy may be better spent building each other up and encouraging action through an optimistic outlook.
Everyone calls X a "dumpster fire" etc, but when I go on there I see see great tech conversations. Database people having fun and chatting about projects. Lots of hackers. A much larger network than bluesky.
You can find good content on almost any platform. The problem is when the negatives become so overwhelming, in your face, and hard to ignore, that you feel like it's moving away from what you want it to be. It's not hard to find good tech conversations on Bluesky, they're just lower volume.
This very much my experience as well with current Twitter/X. I think I can at least express myself without having to ponder if the service itself will ban me for saying that ”the king has no clothes on”.
I finally see on my timeline art and music I like. Not to mention the interesting technology-related discussions.
It’s not all sunshine but things are clearly better with a wider range of opinions being present on my timeline and more variety in content. I just wish I could better filter foreign (esp. USA & UK) political content out of my feed.
For me it's the complete opposite. I stayed because I thought it's a storm that will pass. I even had hope Elon gets bored with it and writes off the loss. Nothing of this has happened and probably ever will.
Most of the interesting people in my circles have left and the ones that stayed are so disconnected that there is no real community any more.
The end this on a higher note. Would you be willing to share some people to follow that make being on X worthwhile for you.
Really it’s the “LLM community”, I’d say ML but I follow plenty of data sciencey folks on Bsky. Lots of LLM folks migrated off Twitter, but it just didn’t take. Network effects imo.
I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.
Outside of bullying, which I do think is a real risk for kids, I don't feel like the time I spend on social media is unhealthy at all. Granted I'm mostly YouTube, zero percent IG or Facebook. I'm really grateful for what Google bought/built.
Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!
> Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!
I also am a big fan of YouTube for exactly this reason, but you need to be careful.
There's all kinds of great educational content on there.
But, for anything "political" or controversial, YouTube can get toxic very quickly. I believe this is going to be true for most social media as long as engagement is the KPI. It directly incentivizes echo chambers, ragebait, and all kinds of terrible discourse.
> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.
It is a common tactic to create a new controversy to take attention away from a much more important topic.
The whole Sydney Sweeney Jeans Advert "controversy" felt like it was AstroTurf-ed.
Less than a few weeks ago. Trump was getting a huge amount of pressure about the lack of transparency with the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. All of that seems to have been forgotten now (or that is at least is my impression).
> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement.
Well, it turns out that some people are actually outraged by a jeans ads... the problem is that these social networks tend to amplify these sort of divise issues for engagement purposes.
My problem with Twitter/X was that, for instance I was following somebody in 2010's who talked about Javascript and Node, only to end up with that person constantly ranting about partisan issues that had nothing to do with it (especially after Trump election), but at the time, Twitter provided no way to limit feeds to center of interests. That made me quit the platform and I imagine it's getting way wore now...
X is so large that it can simultaneously be a giant dumpster fire, the most toxic social network ever to exist, and still have room for honest discussion and good communities.
Gives me some hope for Bluesky, etc. I don't think you need to be Twitter scale or have global network effects to work. Your community just has to choose a particular platform and show a preference for it. You get miniature network effects once your community adopts it.
So if your favorite community doesn't like a particular platform, I don't think they're stuck there, just because it's the one with global scale. They just have to organize an exit.
My problem with Twitter is that it constantly forces unwanted content into my feed. Before I finally quit about a year ago, it was pushing straight-up, no-interpretation-needed, racist and anti-semetic posts into my feed.
If there were a store that secretly sold Nazi propoganda out the back if you gave the owner a special handshake, you'd innocently have no way of knowing and you'd keep shopping at that store. I don't think anyone could hold it over your head that you were shopping at a Nazi store if it were being ran with such discretion.
But if there were a store where the owner occasionally made a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge whoopsy-doodly where he "accidentally" left such stuff out at the checkout counter, just to see if you'd be interested... I'm sorry, there's no way I'd ever go back to that store, no matter how great it's other stuff was. It could be the only place that sold my favorite beer or whatever and it wouldn't matter. Some things are inexcusable.
> Twitter/X is just like every other social network - follow the topics that interest you and you will get good content.
Can’t agree here. I barely use Xitter any more because even when being selective about topics it’s still unsettlingly common to see blue checks showing up in the top of the replies posting some of the most vile things I’ve seen on the publicly accepted internet without the slightest hint of irony.
Setting aside whether or not Elon was trying to do a Nazi salute (as people have made up their minds on that and aren't going to change), it is factually false to call him a "literal Nazi". The Nazi party doesn't exist, there can't be literal Nazis any more. At most you could accuse him of holding to Nazi ideals, but please be accurate in the accusations you levy. Exaggerating by calling someone a "literal Nazi" is extremely unhealthy for society.
Maybe they should include any form of practical appeal process in their policies, so if you get banned from, lets say, leaving a PDS ~6 months ago, which got taken over by bots ~2 week ago, you could appeal the fact that you got swept up in the bans.
Instead the only process is to email an address that no one gets any response from for months on end. (or I guess consider taking bluesky to court, by what this seems to say. Kinda very unreasonable)
Thanks, but it didn’t work very well for me. It’s all politics. I suspect some of the people follow have bad taste, so this is the wrong way to find stuff I’m interested in.
> In some locations, we may be required to restrict access to certain features or content unless you complete an age assurance process and demonstrate that you are an adult.
Not BlueSky specific, but I am getting ready to nuke my accounts on social media and other websites as soon as they start requiring said verifications.
no, some places did signed laws, are about to sign laws which do legally require age checks
e.g. this December a ban for social media for anyone <16y takes effect in Australia. They also removed the power from parents to consent that younger children are allowed to use social media. They require "reasonable" steps to check the age, and nearly did require id checks. Even through they in the end didn't require it but a simple captcha or similar clearly won't be enough.
I wish Bluesky would finally announce how they plan to monetise it all. It feels like things are stuck in-between trying to be “open to the community”, gather developer momentum around ATProto, the promise of decentralisation and independence… and the unknowns of their roadmap ahead?
It’s all very nicely written but the risk of committing oneself (as a user, as a developer, as a social/marketing person, etc) only to get surprised by what/how they generate profit from is just unsettling.
I believe this isn't as much of a problem as it appears to be at first glance because of the scale of social apps like Bluesky.
For example, Wikipedia generates >$180M/yr just by running ads for itself requesting donations. Requesting donations is the least effective monetizing strategy and yet it still works because of scale.
Donations would probably work but Bluesky has additional options. They could create a premium app for power users that just adds nice-to-have features (which may cost real money to provide and maintain), they can resell domain names, they can sell merch, etc.
Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars to be highly sustainable and profitable. It was built and scaled with fewer than 20 full time employees.
The most important and most difficult part is getting to sufficient scale, and that's mostly a matter of just making the app even better than it is today.
I posted a bit about this here: https://bsky.app/profile/jacob.gold/post/3lr5j6o7emk2t
> Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars
Are you sure their investors share this vision?
1. I believe they actually could generate (low) billions of dollars without compromising at all, if they manage to reach true mainstream scale (>1 billion MAUs)
2. I really don't care if the investors/shareholders are disappointed as long as the PBC's mission is fulfilled. Also their control is relatively limited.
Maybe I should have written added this:
Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Bluesky Social, PBC (former employee)
Aren't they at ~10M MAU and falling? At least that's the impression given by https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Investors might get soaked, such is the risk of capital investment. Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.
> Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.
Will it? How much of that doesn't run on investor backed servers today? People often say stuff like this but I haven't seen that work in practice.
Yeah, that’s more of a hope about the future. It’s up to other people to build it.
I’ve seen posts about some poorly-publicized, proof-of-concept alternative implementations that would probably fall over if they got real attention, but I think that shows that it’s not a problem with the protocol itself.
Good enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just about posting comments on the Internet, not bank accounts. If something went fatally wrong, we would move again, just like we moved off previous social networks.
> such is the risk of capital investment
Everyone says that right up until they read the news where the US Government bails those investors out.
It is highly unlikely the US gov bails Bluesky investors out, and I wouldn’t care if they did. $36M raised to date is couch cushion money.
It’s also possible to run an annual event that makes a profit. Which might be something a social network could figure out.
The first club I belonged to as a teenager worked this way. In lieu of high membership dues there was volunteer time spent helping out at or before the event. I was surprised as an adult to learn that some events lose money or only break even.
They better start putting together an avant garde Blue Sky art gallery then. Real estate in NYC and SF aren't cheap.
How about an annual pancake breakfast at the fire station like the local scouts do?
Which means this is going to end badly. A non profit version would be better off headquartered somewhere lower rent.
> the promise of decentralisation
AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.
I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.
Bluesky is built on atproto, which is designed to be "locked open" in a way that can't be rescinded. That was a core design constraint.
VCs funded Netscape which did more than any other company to launch the web and they made a lot of money without having to destroy the ideals of the web.
The PDSes (personal data servers) can be independantly hosted, but Bluesky itself indexes and presents the messages these servers contain in their social-app. Bluesky also maintains the directory of these servers.
Anyone else is also free to run these services (app views, relays) and a few people already are doing this.
An atproto PDS is like a structured-data blog hosted on a web server. Anyone is free to index, relay, and render the data.
Yes, and running these things is prohibitively difficult such as I've only witnessed two full index attempts and no alternative plc directories.
Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.
AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve
Agreed. If you wanna be able to host the whole stack you should just use Mastodon
If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.
If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite
Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.
Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.
> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.
That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription
All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.
"A Full-Network Relay for $34/month" https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
I agree there's a lot of room for improvement in making it easier.
But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.
The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.
hundreds (thousands?) of users have signed up for Bluesky Social, then moved their accounts to independent hosts. folks can use https://zeppelin.social/ as a totally free-standing bluesky posting experience that interoperates with the full network.
Bluesky Social still clearly dominates the ecosystem, but there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.
Do you disagree? Is there a specific centralized component you take issue with?
> there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.
Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?
Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.
Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?
Yes, all of those social graph relationships are hinged off a permanent identifier (DID) and everything comes along when accounts migrate PDS instances. Folks can use zeppelin.social from any PDS instance. The DID PLC directory is currently hosted by Bluesky, but the directory can be forked, and did:web identifiers can be used as an alternative (and several independence-minded folks in the network do so).
Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.
Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.
> Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.
I totally agree. However, a lot of people in the fediverse/ActivityPub world apparently (?) disagree, seeing as your domain is tightly coupled to your server, i.e. no name portability. Seems like a wild oversight to me, and getting massive instances like matrix.org and mastadon.social seems like an inevitable consequence.
Lack of name portability implies greater risk when choosing a server. Greater risk when choosing a server means choosing comparatively less risky servers. Choosing comparatively less risky servers means choosing more well-known servers. Thus you have the GMail-ification of the fediverse.
> Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?
Yes, even if Bluesky was down (as long as they have a backup) which is not the case for ActivityPub.
Even if set aside the details on dependence on bluesky infrastructure, the effort to host “all components” is quite expensive and technology-intensive with significant cost for storage and compute. For example, a deployment of “all the things” (just for you) is in the ballpark of 70-100€/month because the way things are designed to work. And that’s not even factoring the burden of managing the whole range of technologies involved.
Making it hard to setup or run, complex to understand or change are also forms of discouraging independent use.
Same, that’s why I said “the promise of”. Also how do they plan to bill actors in this decentralised system? Is it going to be developers footing the bill? Some premium features only “the main Bluesky instance” has? It’s not clear to me at all.
It's possible that they are uncertain about the path to monetisation. As far as I see, it's either subscriptions or selling ads.
Their uncertainty is magnified on the outside tbh. e.g. There are other things at play that can (probably will) cost a lot of money. The protocol (ATProto) they’re developing and advocating as a “platform”.
Say I’m building a cool app around that, how do I plan how much is this going to cost me and can I stomach the risk of binding myself to this “supposedly open” platform without knowing how it will work in 6 months?
The best way to think about it is to assume you'll want to leave someday, and you'll be going to whichever is the best of the choices at that future time that are early enough to be years away from needing to monetize.
Don't let yourself get attached to any one place. That's the lesson. Staying ahead of monetization is the move. Nothing will stay good forever.
My guess is, they're going to have to be okay with only reaching break-even or slightly over. That's the point, after all. If you're dissatisfied with how any of these decentralized protocol platforms are running things, you're technically free to start your own, and plenty of people have.
Enshittification can't consume low barriers-to-entry markets.
It's not the fault of BlueSky or their users, but I really haven't enjoyed the social media climate right now. If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y. For some subjects that is BlueSky and for others it would be platforms I don't want to participate in.
I think the reality is that most social media platforms will inevitability create hyper-polarized audiences that do little more than generate content.
>It's not the fault of BlueSky or their users
I'd actually argue against this. although I'd probably blame Reddit more.
It is now normal for social media to be composed of echo chambers and that's because administrations and users enable and seek that. If someone's to blame more than Twitter/Reddit and their respective users I'm missing it, and on that note, blocklists as a functionality in BlueSky are there precisely to protect echo chambers.
The hyper-polarization is probably preventable, in my estimation. The main thing a social network would need to do is to stymy the flywheel effect that allows a handful of users (and thus sets of norms) to come to dominate so strongly. That might mean something along the lines of a system that puts a hard cap on the reach any profile or topic can have, and when engagement exceeds the triggering threshold, reach actually tapers off proportionate to how far the threshold is exceeded.
In theory this would naturally elevate posts that are more measured and mundane while sinking posts with big emotional lizard brain appeal (by design or otherwise). With time this would establish a self-reinforcing norm that makes polarized and inflammatory posts look as clownish as they actually are.
A recent study[1] seems to indicate that polarization is a hard problem, along with some of the other negative effects of social media. Many of the commonly suggested solutions have minimal impact, or no effect at all. That flywheel effect is surprisingly robust.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385
I saw that, but the approach taken is questionable (do LLMs represent realistic behavior for scenarios they’ve not been trained for?) and it also doesn’t seem like anything like my suggestions here were tested. It’s better than nothing, but far from conclusive in my opinion.
I think it’s more about not taking posts out of context. Communities need boundaries between them. Substack and other blogging tools are good this way.
For Bluesky, the problem is that the replies to someone you follow can be pretty bad. (Official Bluesky posts are an example of this.) People can filter them individually, but it’s not the same as a blog with good moderation.
I don’t think I could do a whole lot if the replies to one of my Bluesky posts were bad?
But blocking on Bluesky works better than it did on Twitter. If you post a crummy reply to me and I block you, nobody sees your reply. There are a few other small differences between Bluesky and Twitter that really do a lot to cut down on the pile-on effect that’s common at Twitter.
That’s good, but there are low-information posts where a hard block on first offense is kind of harsh.
I think a lot of social network problems would be solved if platforms put an orange flag next to profiles that have posted more than 10 times in the last 24 hours, and a red flag next to profiles that have posted more than 60 times in the last 7 days. The total number of flags ever given to an account on the bio would be good as well. No other automatic action, just a visible flag or other symbol.
Being able to temporarily filter out profiles that post too many times (a setting you could change) would also be nice, but it shouldn't be automatic.
Bluesky has a “quiet posters” feed that I find useful.
It’s somebody’s side-thing, I think and not official Bluesky, but yes, that’s become my primary feed for Bluesky. Following is my secondary and I almost never look at discover or popular with friends.
Not a bad idea. It may also be good to distinguish replies and reposts from unique timeline posts, with “reply guys” consistently being some of the most notorious individuals.
> stymy the flywheel effect that allows a handful of users (and thus sets of norms) to come to dominate so strongly
This prevents certain communities from forming and certain topics from being discussed. For example, you can't discuss LGBTQ issues with troll armies constantly swarming and spamming. If such communities are not given tools to exclude malignant disruptors by setting norms and "dominating" a given channel, they will have to go elsewhere (such as leaving X for BlueSky).
This system wouldn’t work in place of moderation, but rather alongside it. The two would have an enhancing effect on each other:
- Reach limits greatly limit troll effectiveness, since they can’t find each other as easily
- Posts that exceed the threshold naturally vs. being trolled past would have different “fingerprints” that could be used like a blacklight for troll detection for both assisting moderators and for model training for automatic suspected troll flagging
The threshold should probably be dynamic and set at the point at which posts “breach containment” (escape from their intended audience), which is where problems tend to occur.
Bluesky-like self-moderation controls would also help.
moderation inevitably leads to exclusion- just look at the US state specific subreddits that are moderated by radicals who prohibit even the slightest deviation from their views which silences dissent. This one-sided viewpoint is then slurped up and used to train AI models in a kind of gross feedback loop
Reddit’s fatal flaw is that subreddit mods are volunteers. Sometimes this works well when you get a knowledgable, benevolent individual in the position, but more often than not you get people who want to power trip.
Mods should be in-house, on payroll, and strictly bound to the network’s standards.
This should generally be less of an issue anyway in a system that actively penalizes the sorts of crudely expressed, un-nuanced posts that are typically social media’s bread and butter. Not being able to appeal to basal emotions (“it feels right” is a poor metric) and being required to substantiate views more intelligently takes the air out of a lot of fringe sails.
As always, there's a balance. Communities (and individuals) generally need the ability to moderate and manage access to both membership and interactions with the community. Algorithmic-driven open platforms are sorta mutually incompatible with that idea
I think that Twitter (and by extension, Bluesky) is designed in such a way that it promotes hostility and division. You can't really have a good discussion when the format makes people limit their posting to super short messages; it means people just dump hot takes on each other and wind up shouting past each other. So in that sense I certainly would call it the platforms' fault. Twitter (and Bluesky/Mastodon) are toxic to our society and we would be far better off if they were never created.
There's a lot of hot tub parties out there. Some have people you want I really want to interact with, some do not. Some have good house rules making it feel comfortable, some do not.
The best part of BlueSky in my opinion is that it's really easy to control what you want to see, without the site-owner's algorithm choosing for you. No matter who else is at the hot tub party, I don't have to worry much about them peeing in my particular hot tub. I hear Mastodon is somewhat similar, but it's been a while.
The balance between discovery and curation and control is nigh-on perfect for me in BlueSky. If I want to focus just on my corner of the science world, it's super easy for me to build a network of people just in that corner and not get spammed with, say, racially-tinged fight videos that are meant for engagement bait, as has happened on other social networks.
If you want hyper-polarized communities, some of those can be found on BlueSky too! But at least on BlueSky I'm able to choose what I want rather than having the preferences of the site owner control my information environment.
> If I want to have a discussion about subject X I would need to be deep inside echo chamber social media network Y.
To me, this is the crux of your problem. Social media is like a, well, social space like a bar. Not everyone shares the same opinions, but most of the patrons can at least agree enough to not fight each other, which is sort of an echo chamber since yelling something against the grain would get your ask kicked in a bar.
Forums are the place to have a discussion about subject X, since everyone is there to have that discussion. Of course, if you get off topic or snippy the conversation may devolve, but if you stay on topic you can have a nice conversation about subject X.
For all that it sounds unlikely, it'd be nice if the blogosphere, with blog replies and pingbacks, could come back for this sort of discussion. No monetization, though, so substack and co. are out.
What, in your opinion, is wrong with a bit of monetization?
I know it can produce some posts of less value, but it also pulls the blogger back in and allows professionals in certain areas to not feel they give put high quality out there for absolutely nothing.
I just mean, I can see the pros, but not really serious cons, so I'm wondering what your take is?
I left X because of how bad it got but BlueSky is also quite often useless in terms of good discussion. Recently any substack article posted is just filled with comments about how using substack supports Nazi ideology, no other discussion to be had. When it comes to anything related to AI the comments are all about stealing from artists. It is as if people just wait for the right buzzword to appear and post their canned response. Interesting posts that don't cause any controversy just don't have much engagement.
The same trend is noticeable here on HN. Many threads are full of top-level posts that are just someone pattern-matching on a word they don't like in the headline and using it as an excuse to vent about whatever their pet issue is. Usually posts like that are magnets for zero-effort "me too"s and similar. Sometimes interesting discussions happen deeper in the threads, but it's disappointingly rare. It's really sad watching the entire internet turn into this, and I can't help but feel like places like Twitter/X and Bluesky are the source.
My qualms with Bluesky has less to do with ideological leanings (it’s true that there are ethics implications that a lot of people like to sweep under the rug and that should be pointed out) and more with how depressing it is to use, with an overwhelming sentiment of doom.
I’m not going to bury my head in the sand and pretend everything is just peachy (it’s not) but the doomerism is so strong and pervasive that I think it breeds complacency that when met with the sugar high of social media engagement reacts to form armchair activism (which breeds yet more complacency). All that time and energy may be better spent building each other up and encouraging action through an optimistic outlook.
The hyper-polarization is already in the real world, so I don't think social media can avoid that.
[dead]
That's the one question I had over and over when Twitter was slowly dying. Do we really need another Twitter?
This completely depends on the moderation policies of the website. So, yes, the platforms are at fault.
Everyone calls X a "dumpster fire" etc, but when I go on there I see see great tech conversations. Database people having fun and chatting about projects. Lots of hackers. A much larger network than bluesky.
You can find good content on almost any platform. The problem is when the negatives become so overwhelming, in your face, and hard to ignore, that you feel like it's moving away from what you want it to be. It's not hard to find good tech conversations on Bluesky, they're just lower volume.
This very much my experience as well with current Twitter/X. I think I can at least express myself without having to ponder if the service itself will ban me for saying that ”the king has no clothes on”.
I finally see on my timeline art and music I like. Not to mention the interesting technology-related discussions.
It’s not all sunshine but things are clearly better with a wider range of opinions being present on my timeline and more variety in content. I just wish I could better filter foreign (esp. USA & UK) political content out of my feed.
For me it's the complete opposite. I stayed because I thought it's a storm that will pass. I even had hope Elon gets bored with it and writes off the loss. Nothing of this has happened and probably ever will.
Most of the interesting people in my circles have left and the ones that stayed are so disconnected that there is no real community any more.
The end this on a higher note. Would you be willing to share some people to follow that make being on X worthwhile for you.
Really it’s the “LLM community”, I’d say ML but I follow plenty of data sciencey folks on Bsky. Lots of LLM folks migrated off Twitter, but it just didn’t take. Network effects imo.
I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.
Outside of bullying, which I do think is a real risk for kids, I don't feel like the time I spend on social media is unhealthy at all. Granted I'm mostly YouTube, zero percent IG or Facebook. I'm really grateful for what Google bought/built.
Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!
I use Instagram mostly for educational and artistic content.
It's generally a positive experience for me. It's not the network but what people follow there.
> Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!
I also am a big fan of YouTube for exactly this reason, but you need to be careful.
There's all kinds of great educational content on there.
But, for anything "political" or controversial, YouTube can get toxic very quickly. I believe this is going to be true for most social media as long as engagement is the KPI. It directly incentivizes echo chambers, ragebait, and all kinds of terrible discourse.
> I don't feel like the time I spend on social media is unhealthy at all. Granted I'm mostly YouTube, zero percent IG or Facebook.
This is a good point. Social media isn’t unhealthy if you don’t use it
> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement. Are they really? Who? How many? Really I think it's just something to argue about for entertainment's sake.
It is a common tactic to create a new controversy to take attention away from a much more important topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
The whole Sydney Sweeney Jeans Advert "controversy" felt like it was AstroTurf-ed.
Less than a few weeks ago. Trump was getting a huge amount of pressure about the lack of transparency with the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. All of that seems to have been forgotten now (or that is at least is my impression).
> I couldn't agree more. It's like when you see headlines claiming "people" are outraged by a jeans advertisement.
Well, it turns out that some people are actually outraged by a jeans ads... the problem is that these social networks tend to amplify these sort of divise issues for engagement purposes.
My problem with Twitter/X was that, for instance I was following somebody in 2010's who talked about Javascript and Node, only to end up with that person constantly ranting about partisan issues that had nothing to do with it (especially after Trump election), but at the time, Twitter provided no way to limit feeds to center of interests. That made me quit the platform and I imagine it's getting way wore now...
The dumpster fire aspect is mostly that it's a thunderdome of engagement bait at this point.
Just thousands of people posting whatever nonsense they can to get their $5 in adshare revenue.
The way they do this - topics, language - is less bothersome to me than the underlying economy of it.
X is so large that it can simultaneously be a giant dumpster fire, the most toxic social network ever to exist, and still have room for honest discussion and good communities.
Gives me some hope for Bluesky, etc. I don't think you need to be Twitter scale or have global network effects to work. Your community just has to choose a particular platform and show a preference for it. You get miniature network effects once your community adopts it.
So if your favorite community doesn't like a particular platform, I don't think they're stuck there, just because it's the one with global scale. They just have to organize an exit.
> I see see great tech conversations
And so what? The app is controlled by, and profits, a psychotic oligarch. That should be a dealbreaker for you.
Chick-fil-A also has good chicken, but no reasonable adult can stomach their politics—and you're buying those, too, when you patronize their shop.
Edit: to be clear, I'm suggesting that your participation in this media system is selfish, myopic, and harmful.
It sounds like you might have problems with "black and white thinking"
My problem with Twitter is that it constantly forces unwanted content into my feed. Before I finally quit about a year ago, it was pushing straight-up, no-interpretation-needed, racist and anti-semetic posts into my feed.
If there were a store that secretly sold Nazi propoganda out the back if you gave the owner a special handshake, you'd innocently have no way of knowing and you'd keep shopping at that store. I don't think anyone could hold it over your head that you were shopping at a Nazi store if it were being ran with such discretion.
But if there were a store where the owner occasionally made a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge whoopsy-doodly where he "accidentally" left such stuff out at the checkout counter, just to see if you'd be interested... I'm sorry, there's no way I'd ever go back to that store, no matter how great it's other stuff was. It could be the only place that sold my favorite beer or whatever and it wouldn't matter. Some things are inexcusable.
[dead]
[flagged]
Bluesky is great if only because people like you self quarantine there.
[flagged]
man can we stop calling everyone a Nazi? It's so tiresome. And there is no such idiom in German btw.
Twitter/X is just like every other social network - follow the topics that interest you and you will get good content.
> Twitter/X is just like every other social network - follow the topics that interest you and you will get good content.
Can’t agree here. I barely use Xitter any more because even when being selective about topics it’s still unsettlingly common to see blue checks showing up in the top of the replies posting some of the most vile things I’ve seen on the publicly accepted internet without the slightest hint of irony.
[dead]
I would if X’s owner weren’t a literal nazi who does literal nazi salutes. It’s not really an exaggeration.
And idk where anyone else is looking but while there are still some good posters the comments on X are uniformly vile
You mean like this?
https://d2u3dcdbebyaiu.cloudfront.net/uploads/atch_img/391/b...
Show videos - a wave and a salute are different.
Setting aside whether or not Elon was trying to do a Nazi salute (as people have made up their minds on that and aren't going to change), it is factually false to call him a "literal Nazi". The Nazi party doesn't exist, there can't be literal Nazis any more. At most you could accuse him of holding to Nazi ideals, but please be accurate in the accusations you levy. Exaggerating by calling someone a "literal Nazi" is extremely unhealthy for society.
Dawg, all he talks about is white genocide.
I can compromise on neo-nazi
[flagged]
Maybe they should include any form of practical appeal process in their policies, so if you get banned from, lets say, leaving a PDS ~6 months ago, which got taken over by bots ~2 week ago, you could appeal the fact that you got swept up in the bans.
Instead the only process is to email an address that no one gets any response from for months on end. (or I guess consider taking bluesky to court, by what this seems to say. Kinda very unreasonable)
I would like for these guys to figure out how to keep bad drawings and cartoon porn from people I don't even follow out of my discover feed
I assume there are better Discover feeds out there. Anyone have any recommendations?
This one has been popular recently: https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/feed/for-...
(there are several feeds named "For You"; IIUC this started a couple weeks ago and is based on "likes by people you follow"
Thanks, but it didn’t work very well for me. It’s all politics. I suspect some of the people follow have bad taste, so this is the wrong way to find stuff I’m interested in.
Bluesky is still a thing? Everyone on Facebook that were leaving Twitter came crawling back.
I can't quite parse the second sentence but in any case "everyone" makes the statement obviously false whatever you intended to claim.
We have the data :)
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
But do you have a point you want to make?
If yes, it is not obvious to me.
What's the significant new information here, and is there an article anywhere that specifically covers it?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/14/bluesky-rolls-out-massive-...
> In some locations, we may be required to restrict access to certain features or content unless you complete an age assurance process and demonstrate that you are an adult.
Not BlueSky specific, but I am getting ready to nuke my accounts on social media and other websites as soon as they start requiring said verifications.
I truly don't what to expect from this trend.
Given how things are going, I expect to I'll need to age verify accounts that are almost twenty years.
> demonstrate that you are an adult
maybe they mean a captcha like "do the taxes for this guy"
no, some places did signed laws, are about to sign laws which do legally require age checks
e.g. this December a ban for social media for anyone <16y takes effect in Australia. They also removed the power from parents to consent that younger children are allowed to use social media. They require "reasonable" steps to check the age, and nearly did require id checks. Even through they in the end didn't require it but a simple captcha or similar clearly won't be enough.
> Not BlueSky specific, but I am getting ready to nuke my accounts on social media
This is the way, folks.
If YouTube or Reddit requires me to upload ID, I am going to delete my account.
I mean, feels like we're going to have relearn what the tech can do.
It's possible to do all of this without permission, it's just hard...
[flagged]