<story><title>I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky</title><url>https://worthdoingbadly.com/bsky/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SeanAnderson</author><text>I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I&amp;#x27;m unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.&lt;p&gt;C&amp;#x27;mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; and we&amp;#x27;ve slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.&lt;p&gt;Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it&amp;#x27;s a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!&lt;p&gt;I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I&amp;#x27;m sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I&amp;#x27;ll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well!  I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jug</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m also trying to stay positive.&lt;p&gt;In that spirit, I really enjoy:&lt;p&gt;1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common.&lt;p&gt;2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of federated protocol and distributing blocklists. You can tell they have seasoned developers on the team. This is not just any kind of gimmick network trying to cash grab on Twitter exodus like I feel Hive Social was. It is an actual attempt at something better than Mastodon that has a fun, social experience with good onboarding and solving account migration headaches in mind.&lt;p&gt;3. The rare service disruptions despite the developers having their plates full and commonly introducing updates to the service. This speaks loudly about software architecture skills and being humble to risk management with good software hygiene. This again is not something that just happens but takes effort, experience and intent.&lt;p&gt;4. The exciting model of DNS approval which I still like. It&amp;#x27;s bloody fantastic to self-verify in a way that actually makes sense, and it feels very &amp;quot;World Wide Web&amp;quot; in a Tim Berners-Lee way. It uses pillars of the modern Internet in a way to strengthen a service and promises verification at scale. It can do company-wide verifications (domain.tld) as well as contributor-specific ones (username.team.company.tld). So, I dearly hope any misuse can be countered.&lt;p&gt;5. I worry they are overreaching with the AT protocol and federation but there is the &amp;quot;Shooting for the stars and aiming for the moon&amp;quot; saying here. I can only wish them the best and if I refer to the points above, the developer team seems surprisingly capable and full of actual intent here.</text></comment>
<story><title>I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky</title><url>https://worthdoingbadly.com/bsky/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SeanAnderson</author><text>I would just like to say that I am excited for Bluesky to exist. It might go poorly, but I&amp;#x27;m unwilling to write off weird attempts at innovation before the technology has had a chance to evolve in the wild.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen several posts lately that have made me feel like the HN sentiment towards Bluesky is negative. Throwing them under the bus for the domain validation mistake. Hatred at commercialization of a protocol. Questioning why Bluesky would do anything but become a worse Twitter since Jack Dorsey is at the helm.&lt;p&gt;C&amp;#x27;mon! At least give it the benefit of doubt while in beta! I, for one, frequently lament how fragmented my IM programs have become. I felt like there was an ideal point where Pidgin + XMPP interfaced with &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; and we&amp;#x27;ve slowly walked away from that high water mark. So, approaching communication at the protcol level has a certain appeal. I get the reasoning behind the goal.&lt;p&gt;Do I have concerns that this is another attempt at building a walled garden around something I wish to be open and interoperable? Of course! Do I think it&amp;#x27;s a net negative on society for someone to be making their attempt? No! Bring on the new tech!&lt;p&gt;I wish I had a more nuanced argument to make my case because I&amp;#x27;m sure there will be tons of replies here telling me why my opinion is bad and I&amp;#x27;ll be unable to refute them. And those responses will likely make very fair points, but oh well!  I needed to at least try to throw some optimism about technology into the HackerNews foray.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snickerbockers</author><text>TBH I haven&amp;#x27;t paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I&amp;#x27;m not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub&amp;#x2F;Fediverse doesn&amp;#x27;t already fill.  It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network.&lt;p&gt;And one of the things that needs to be emphasized that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that twitter was already terrible a *long* time before Musk bought it.  Jack and his cronies aren&amp;#x27;t actually any better than Musk is, they&amp;#x27;re just smart enough not to make an ass of themselves in front of the entire world.  I don&amp;#x27;t trust them.</text></comment>