null0pointer
6 days ago
A lot of commenters here are having their minds blown by this. And while I also love this I get the sense that many others here are maybe too young to remember that this kind of open access to data used to exist for lots websites. It inspired companion sites and loads of creativity. I find it tragic really, what the internet has become. I hope federated, and even more-so p2p, protocols take significant foothold on the internet and help revive this spirit of the web. The corpo-web is so fucking boring.
paulgb
6 days ago
It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s.
I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.
AshamedCaptain
6 days ago
> I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.
Why would it? They can still lock everything down and few Bluesky users will even notice. This is similar to what Twitter did, or what Google Chat did, etc. Compare this to other federation platforms where a server that locks itself down loses access to a huge chunk of the network, once the other servers reciprocate.
diggan
6 days ago
> Why would it?
Since migrating your personal data was a thing they thought about since day one, migrating to another network than the current one would be way easier than any centralized service and also easier than ActivityPub.
Seems there is one piece of the puzzle missing yet ("AppViews") in ATProto to be able to run completely independent, but seems they're currently working on getting that in place now.
shafyy
6 days ago
You can host your personal data, but as long as Bluesky Social, PBC is running the main Relay and AppView, and there's no easy way for Relays to talk to each other (like e.g. it works in Mastodon), they are in reality a centralized service.
Oh yes, and they are the only ones owning and developing AT Protocol, which makes it much more a currently-open-sourced protocol rather than a standard that is jointly developed by the industry.
rakoo
6 days ago
The big central place is still the PLC directory that effectively means all accounts are centralized at BlueSky, even if your posts are not. They haven't planned to make it any decentralized in the future.
YetAnotherNick
6 days ago
Nothing technical is preventing any federated platform to stop sharing the content with its peer. Only thing that prevents it is if there are multiple big peer and they can't afford a network partition, which is not the case with bluesky. Eventually VC's money will run dry and they don't have any solution for this.
AshamedCaptain
6 days ago
You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
diggan
6 days ago
> You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily
Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.
AshamedCaptain
6 days ago
But I'm guessing that you'll also have to request your followers to use a different AppView if Bluesky did a Twitter.
glenstein
6 days ago
>In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc.
Right. This is something I keep pointing out in threads about RSS. Some people will say RSS never left. Well, it left Twitter for one. Google News and Craigslist for others.
I almost wonder, to GP's point, if people have just completely forgotten all of this, which is why they think nothing was lost.
echelon
6 days ago
The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today, despite all of the WASM, WebGPU, JIT optimizations, and other technologies that have been developed in more recent years.
We had torrents, open data, open protocols, and people were sharing data and remixing it freely. Mountains of stuff like this Bluesky demo was released every single day. We had link aggregators to point to the cool things that were happening, and we even had tools that let you pipe data sources between various APIs to enrich and recombine things easily.
Platforms stopped this. Facebook, Google, and even Apple put an end to the wildly evolutionary behavior by delivering a canned experience to the masses.
We need a return to P2P where single platform silos and their army of product managers don't shape how we interact with technology and the bulk flow of information.
1024core
6 days ago
> The 2000s Internet felt way more innovative than the one we have today
Because it seems like this stuff is taught in Management 101 in all of the business schools: once you establish yourself with all this talk about "openness", etc. then the only way to succeed is by creating a walled garden, either through abuse of your monopoly position or by regulatory capture.
Cases in point: OpenAI _and_ Anthropic both pushing for regulation of AI, now that they have a dominant position.
I swear, the moment MBAs get involved, they try the same crap everywhere.
threeseed
6 days ago
It's a common trope to blame MBAs for all the ills in the world.
But the reality is that having a moat and how to defend it is a fundamental strategy that every CEO is expected to know. Because it will be one of the first things you get asked from YC, investors etc.
And using regulation to lock out competitors definitely did not start with OpenAI and Anthropic.
1024core
6 days ago
> And using regulation to lock out competitors definitely did not start with OpenAI and Anthropic.
That's what I'm saying: it started with the MBAs.
larodi
6 days ago
Indeed.
Question is whether this all that was in the 90s can again be relevant for the young who grew with TikTok, insta and fb.
I don’t have the answer, only doubts…
Now with GPTs more than ever people can regain their web presence. But do they do it? I guess not as much as one would expect.
You may say we need to go p2p again and perhaps Tim Berns Lee actually meant p2p with the HTML, but are people aware of this daring need?
hn72774
6 days ago
I see 2 way to do this. A company (and PM) sees demand for the feature and they include it, ot it is forced by regulation.
A lot of these companies that originally had open standards formed with huge amounts of VC money and they prioritized growth over everything else. Then when they reached a certain scale, investors valued profitability and they slowly squeezed and monetized users until all of those open standards features were gone.
threeseed
6 days ago
This is just revisionist history.
We still have all the tools you talk about today. But with the benefit of much simpler languages and SDKs and tools like LLMs to help generate code. I've seen children learn programming far faster with Swift Playground on their iPad than I had to with C++ books.
And these sort of canned experience are what helped bring technology to everyone. Which was always supposed to be the main goal.
echelon
6 days ago
It's a little bit of both in this case.
Kids are all over Discord, Roblox, Minecraft, and VRchat. They're writing scripts and mods, and that's great. They're probably having a blast and a good number of them are learning a lot.
But they're doing all of these things in someone else's walled garden, on buttoned up platforms that typically constrain what they can accomplish. There are fewer degrees of freedom and a lot less ownership in the work they're doing.
These platforms also cost kids money. They use toxic gotcha mechanics and peer pressure to monetize. This part is strictly worse.
It's a lot different carving out your own clubhouse and culture when you're renting. Especially when you're made to speak a certain language and abide by a rigid set of rules.
cma
6 days ago
They are a public benefit corporation that use that as a selling point but then don't disclose their charter. That seems really shady to me, but less than what twitter has become.
ideashower
6 days ago
I’m struggling to recall some of those early fun accounts. Do you remember any interesting automated feeds from Twitter’s early days?
paulgb
6 days ago
I used to run a cron job that would scrape my university's daily bulletin and post every day right after it was updated. It may have been the first “presence” the university had on twitter. I remember following things like weather stations that had automated accounts, as well.
blitzar
5 days ago
https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/12/newlywed-sex-tweets/
Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex.
They’re on the job! #1 – Action commenced at 12.21GMT. Weight: 84KG.
They’re off the job! #1 – Action concluded at 12.24GMT. Duration: 3 m.15 s. Frenzy Index: 8 (scary). Judge’s Comment: “Is that it?”
FranOntanaya
6 days ago
irssi had a plugin to read and post to Twitter from IRC, it was neat.
bloopernova
6 days ago
A long long time ago, LiveJournal used to display all new user-uploaded images in a firehose type page.
It was a fascinating glimpse into the shared lives of people all over the world. It was definitely from a simpler time; there's no way something like that would be available now due to the violence/abuse material that gets uploaded.
weberer
6 days ago
I'm not too up to date on Twitter clones. What's the difference between this and Mastadon?
geek_at
6 days ago
Mastodon has about 1 million active accounts, bluesky has 12 and you can also host your own data. Threads (by meta) has 100 million but you can't federate it yet so bluesky is the way to go currently for selfhosters and privacy advocates.
gdubs
6 days ago
Mastodon is also confusing for a lot of people and when you point it out techies will appear to yell at you and tell you that "no in fact it isn't."
Whereas Bluesky has a familiar consumer app feeling to it.
Each of these sites also has a distinct vibe. Threads, for example, feels a bit like when Time Square turned into a kind of Disney property. It's clean and safe! But it also lacks a bit of soul.
threeseed
6 days ago
Threads has about ~300m MAUs so far higher than 100m accounts.
And you can federate it with ActivityPub just not fully supporting it yet.
AI_beffr
6 days ago
BS is a cynical data-grab and will lock down and back-stab its users as soon as it can do so and be competitive.
threeseed
6 days ago
As opposed to X, which told users it would be using their content to train Grok.
No matter which way you spin it, Bluesky is significantly better than X.
blitzar
5 days ago
Tweets seem a truly terrible way to train Ai.
AI_beffr
6 days ago
except on X you can actually say what you think.
https://x.com/search?q=bluesky%20banned&src=typed_query&f=to...
inpdx
5 days ago
Elon just posted a Tweet that if you post pictures of food you can get banned. Food. It's run at the caprice of a thin-skinned Napoleon at this point.
wrboyce
5 days ago
…weird
AI_beffr
5 days ago
not really. its stalking. it poses a direct threat to someones safety. and people arent even supposed to have that information under the current rules... thats why its only possible to get his jets location by crowd-sourcing it. anonymity for high profile passengers is a legitimate concern, enough for the FAA to bake it into how these flights are tracked. soon this loophole will be closed and then what will you point to? how could you seriously compare this to being banned for saying something that is politically incorrect?
teddyfrozevelt
5 days ago
you can't even say "cis" on twitter without the tweet getting hidden
andelink
6 days ago
I can't even view that link without logging in
davidcbc
6 days ago
Even if true, which I'm skeptical of, social media sites don't have to be permanent. It's no different from any other service being enshittified, just use it until it sucks and then stop.
ericjmorey
6 days ago
I'm thinking that it's a cynical way to put all the data on an open network rather than a gated and paywalled one. As far as I can tell, Bluesky is still entirely funded by Twitter and that will eventually be cut off. They're betting on the Google/Mozilla type relationship to be maintained for now. They need to make the indexing service easier to replicate before that happens or the network will collapse when funds dry up.
jazzyjackson
6 days ago
They have nothing to do with Twitter anymore. Last round was funded by Blockchain Capital