hckrnws
> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful.
Wizards can be difficult to develop and maintain. Writing a working, useful, functional, robust, informative, environment-agnostic, and re-entrant script (or GUI/TUI) can take a lot of effort. Now that LLMs abound, much of the grind is quickly solved. For example, here's a vibe-coded script that to get dovecot, postfix, and virtual users set up on my new server with mailboxes copied from an old server:
https://autonoma.ca/mail-setup.txt
To vibe code it, the prompt included content from:
https://xtreamsolution.net/complete-email-server-setup-tutor...
After a few kicks at the can (run script, capture errors, feed errors to LLM, repeat), it finally configured a working system. Reviewing the script, yes, it's beyond painful. It doesn't have to be, though; the authors of complex software could produce similar wizards.
When reading any essay about the perils & merits of Bluesky's architecture, save yourself some time by searching for "Blacksky" in the post. If they don't address Blacksky, more than likely the author's understanding of the space has major gaps.
(Blacksky is the/one of the furthest along in building competing versions of each part of the AT proto stack.)
I know very well what it is, it doesn’t change anything in the grand scheme of things. I wish it did!
Re-reading my reply, it is worded more harshly than I intended. My apologies.
I do think it's a critical omission to not address the main player(s?) who are working on key parts of this, and where they may yet run into problems.
But how is that 'decentralized' which was the entire point of Bluesky and the AT protocol to begin with? We're just back to running centralized services. Without decentralization this is just XMPP with extra steps. You might as well just run something like Movim and save yourself the hassle.
There's "decentralized" in the sense that every device runs the whole stack. In an analogy to another protocol, this would be like running SMTP and IMAP on your phone and laptop.
Then there's "decentralized" in the sense that the protocols that govern are open and anyone can plug in without permission. This is how email works in practice. Most people do not choose to run their own email servers, but they nonetheless benefit from the fact that people who are interested can do so and provide email service.
Bluesky is the second kind of decentralized.
Does it require people change defaults? If so then 99% will never use it.
A system or protocol is whatever the easiest user journey is. Anything outside of that will never be seen by many users unless there is some value to be gained by going there. And that value has to be something gained now, not a hypothetical like insurance against future closing of the network. People don’t like to buy insurance.
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Yeah I’m the guy quoted in the opening of the article.
Yes. Be wary of Bluesky. That’s our whole point. Run the infrastructure on your own. Build separate companies.
Most of the complaints here are just about the cost of scale. You are able to fetch the whole network and its history, and that costs time and money. The only structural centralization is PLC, which is being factored into an independent org.
It really does feel like an article written from the outside while pretending to have an inside perspective. There's a deep and overriding ignorance of the discussion within the development community on all these issues and all the progress that's been made.
I might be misunderstanding something about atproto, but isn't it always possible to export data from bluesky because all it takes is reading your data, which is done by any app interacting with your pds anyway? If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality entirely, no?
> If they block that, they're blocking atproto functionality entirely, no?
Keep in mind, twitter got rid of their API. Google got rid of XMPP federation. Bluesky breaking or defederating atproto wouldn't impact most users, so they'd probably get less outcry than those examples.
> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
Yeah, it played out with my whole social circle leaving, as evidenced by the fact that all my friends link me to the bluesky post whenever there's something happening now.
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a fresh social graph, especially when the migration feels so organic. However, the author makes a poignant point about the inherent tension in building a protocol while simultaneously acting as its primary, VC-backed gatekeeper.
The real test for the AT Protocol will be whether it can truly decouple from Bluesky PBC before the pressures of monetization or an exit strategy kick in. Right now, we’re benefiting from the "honeymoon phase" of a platform that needs growth more than revenue, but history suggests that the bridge to true decentralization needs to be fully built before that dynamic inevitably shifts.
Bluesky is architected so you can export your data and follows and followers to your own or someone else's infrastructure at any time. There are some groups that have taken that offer and moved off of Bluesky's infrastructure (see Blacksky). The fact that most people aren't doing that is a sign that people are happy with how Bluesky-the-company is running things. What's the issue?
Most people were happy with Twitter as well
And Bluesky is better because you're not locked in and can export your posts, follows, and followers off of their infrastructure if they start being evil or you randomly feel like it. Companies like Twitter effectively wield network effects to stop people from leaving. All of one's activity on Twitter increases the sunk cost to keep them on Twitter in a way that's not true for Bluesky.
I recognize that Bluesky is at present more open than Twitter and that all of the necessary building blocks for the infra are publicly available. That's good of course.
However I think the view you expressed there is misguided. If Bluesky locked out third party infra tomorrow presumably the vast majority of people would not move. Thus vendor lockin via network effects remains. (Ie you are always free to leave but you'd be moving from a metropolis to a backwater.)
The only scenario where this isn't true is one where no more than a few percent of the people you interact with reside on any given node. By that metric small AP nodes pass while large ones such as the flagship Mastodon node fail. Similarly Gmail and Outlook fail while any self hosted mail server passes.
It's not an easy problem to solve.
I don't have a horse in this race, but:
> [..] machine-readable archive of information associated with your account in HTML and JSON files. [..] including your profile information, your posts, your Direct Messages, your Moments, your media ([..]), a list of your followers, a list of accounts that you are following, your address book, Lists that you’ve created, are a member of or follow, [..], and more.
(Note that I actually elided some additional things that are included in the export, for readability's sake.)
https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-your-x...
You can't actually use your followers and following list from X on other sites. With Bluesky, you can move your profile onto other infrastructure, continue to see posts from people you follow, and make new posts that your followers still see like nothing happened. It's like how if you own your own domain name, you can set your MX records to whatever email service you want and change it when you want without affecting anyone you're having email conversations with.
Ah, I see. Your use of the term "export" made me misunderstand. Though now that I've thought about it for a few minutes, I'm not sure what verb makes sense [to me] there. I guess "migrate?"
edit: also, thanks for clarifying!
That's a very strong statement to make.
whether you agree or not, asking "what's the issue" misses the point very badly, since the article is almost entirely about what the issue is (i.e. that most people will not change defaults and the default is to centralise on the bluesky servers)
The fact that the system is built around this escape hatch makes it miles better than almost all other social networks. An escape hatch doesn't need to be used by most people to be valuable.
Nostr doesn’t have these issues
I know when I’m using a Nostr app because its logo is an endless spinner.
At the scales these systems run at, you need large indexes. Distributing those indexes across many nodes would require a breakthrough in federated queries, and if you have one of those lying around I’d pay good money for it.
It's weird to focus on that when there isn't a single thing in software that doesn't suffer from "everyone will just use the default anyway"
Nostr doesn’t have these issues
yeah I'm not saying the blog is right or wrong; I'm just saying that describing bsky's features and asking "what's the issue?" means you aren't engaging with what it's actually saying.
I’m not the previous poster, but I don’t see any cogent points in the article to engage with in any depth.
> That's the same argument people made about Twitter. "If it goes bad, we'll just leave." We know how that played out.
But they migrated to Bluesky, right? So it played out fine?
> At every layer, the answer is "anyone can run their own." At every layer, almost nobody does.
But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well. But also I don't understand why any of this is a reason to be "wary", it's a great place to be with some unique technical properties - it is way more "open" than any other platform of similar scale.
> But people do and it is reportedly fairly easy so the majority of people are on Bluesky's layers while all is well.
The post discusses why, when all is not well, it will be too late.
At this point I despair at anyone who doesn’t understand that the problem isn’t the specific architecture, it’s social media as a scaled up, algorithmically driven concept. Stick so many people on one social graph that can’t possibly be effectively moderated by humans and it will turn into the same pit every time.
Site is down at this moment.
Archived: https://archive.ph/PsTrp
There seems to be an issue with the caching mechanism that I built.
In the meantime the article is also on Nostr if anyone wants to read it: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzql5ujf9w2f2ujkj9f552a...
Thanks for the heads up!
>> You can self-host a PDS. Almost nobody does.
Who would've thought true decentralization means everyone hosting their own server? Yes, each user would have to pay and maintain it, but that's the cost of decentralization. ATProto at least makes it easy to jump ship if shit hits the fan and not have to start from scratch. Try doing that with Twitter/Instagram/Etc.
"That's the same argument people made about Twitter. 'If it goes bad, we'll just leave.' We know how that played out."
Yeah, I left.
(And in fact I am wary of all social media.)
So it played very poorly, you lost personal data and most importantly, social connections, and acquired a weariness
Bluesky's behavior here isn't surprising.
They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block alias emails to their unban support address too.
There doesn't seem to be a timestamp associated with this article, but it is based on outdated information.
How so?
I should add a time stamp to the blog.
There are specific steps Bluesky could take to decentralize the network. These are going to sound extreme but I agree with the article that it will never decentralize on its own. (Nothing will ever decentralize on its own so this isn't a criticism of Bluesky specifically.)
1. Strongly encourage backups.
2. Force users to migrate off the "official" PDS until it has less than, say, 40% market share.
3. Make the mobile apps use third-party relay/appview by default (could be randomized).
> Strongly encourage backups
Or invert this, and make it local-first. It's your data, and publishing it to a network is a form of backup. Either that, or the client holds a local copy by default.
It's not clear to me what a local-first social network would mean. The point is for other people to see your posts.
The data is local-first, but it's designed so that you publish to online networks. The point is to invert the current model of putting your content into someone else's network and hoping for the best, or expecting users to remember to run some manual backup that's probably going to be a pain to do anything with.
Bluesky isn't my bank records, isn't my photo archive, isn't my github, isn't my Documents folder.
I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever.
Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the coffee shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are 99K coffee shops in the US. I can go to another one.
As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by despicable beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough interesting people that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee shop or a bar.
This feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out of social media entirely). I wish there wasn’t this tension between scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of tech were a little less winner-takes-all. But such is the nature of global digital distribution. Decentralization and local-first are nice ideas but they create a pretty high barrier to entry that keeps a lot of interesting people out. If I’m going to be on social media I don’t want to be in a cesspool like Twitter but I also don’t want to be an idealogical hobbyist bubble.
This is where I'm at, but it would be nice if it had some more longevity to it, as there are costs to switching to the next thing and the thing after that.
I dont get why you're downvoted.
Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is not yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should be disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be treated as disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material things your accumulate in life, why would you hoard random tweets, comments and reactions forever?
If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way that doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity, no?
"Switching costs" man... people move between countries with vastly different languages and cultures and they adapt, make new relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A to database B that difficult really?
True p2p is the only approach that will work, not federation. I'd go futher and make the protocol high-friction for federation.
It's true that many p2p attempts have failed, but it's also the only solution that doesn't require someone running servers for free. There's evidence of success as well: napster (and bittorrent). Both were wildly successful, and ultimately died because of legal issues. It might work when the data is yours to share.
I can't imagine a world where a p2p social network is practical. Not when each node is an unreliable mobile phone that's maybe on cellular. Even with something like ipfs you have pinning services, bittorrent has seed boxes, because pure p2p is impractical.
You can have your other devices and friends replicating.
That uses a lot of bandwidth and battery. I'd rather find a better way to pay for servers than try to avoid them.
It's good FUD. You re-iterate their talking points. (Also, no CTA, no takeaway, just "worry!")
As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful. We do have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to use interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC commitment, which will at least have moderate legal costs if not a guarantee. It has unequivocally set a new high bar.
They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The day may come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but the turn has to be pretty complete, because the data is pretty open. What's needed to view it, use it at all, is pretty close to what's needed to host it.
"The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with other apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps." Yeah, it's possible. It's also possible they just close.
> If an acquirer disables exports, it doesn't matter that the tools existed yesterday.
Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the cheapest way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks to the EU (GDPR Article 20)?
They can give it to you in the least useful way imaginable and will. What we want and expect is an export that can be easily imported to some other provider and that's where the "good guys" can differentiate.
I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks, logins, etc. and import into any other browser with almost no trouble at all. Try to export your mainstream social network (facebook, twitter, insta, tiktok, etc.) content and connections and import it into another social network and let me know how that goes.
Also, at best this says not to host your data on someone else's computer and keep control of it, which is a thing Bluesky explicitly supports and encourages.
Will normal people do it, no. But you can.
For more atproto, see their recently redesigned homepage https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
If anything gets too popular too quickly, I just assume it's a PsyOp. That kind of growth requires extensive media coordination and big money. If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product. As sure as gravity.
Good points, but what's the alternative at this point?
Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists.
Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.
which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever.
That's just not practical for most people (the publishing part). And in relation to microblogging, are you going to publish every 140-character, out-of-context thought on your personal website?
There's other syndication models, although POSSE gets talked about most.
If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media sites.
And the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky or whatever and the content is replicated to your pds. I recognize the minor difference, but if you have the energy and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across silos, surely you can setup a pds elsewhere.
I think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the network effect as you have followers on other platforms already. People can still find you and your content isn't lost.
Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.
Ok yea that makes sense.
Nostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.
But does it have a critical mass of people?
The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."
That's not my crowd.
I hear you but if you think about it who else has an incentive and skills to create something like Nostr? Who are the people interested in free speech, signatures and decentralization and with the skills to pull it up?
And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing everything.
From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show.
Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator.
It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.
Isn't Mastodon an alternative?
Not in terms of having a critical mass of users for many topics or being very accessible for a lot of people.
I can’t comment on the “critical mass”, since I haven’t got the numbers. But what exactly does “accessibility” mean in this context? What are the challenges of opening an account in mastodon.social?
If you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a dead end.
I mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it is not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things I'm interested in to make it worthwhile.
Go outside
(Throwaway account.)
Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own data, so that's enough, right?"
Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into the did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web accounts by manually setting DNS records.
So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting into this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers this, but maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from missing the point.
Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which control users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to include more functionality that prevents users from easily exiting the network, e.g. private data is being implemented in a way where Bluesky LLC can see all your activity. The protocol changes often and with limited community input.
This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and "our users are okay with it". The community does pretty consistently attack people who dissent (e.g. look at what happened when Mastodon leaders objected). There's a lot of cheerleading for people who do opt into the system, and there's really no incentive for informed criticisms.
It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a great network for a number of specific subcultures who have a nice space away from X, and I hope the team embraces that.
I've never looked at the AT Protocol before. It seems like you could have achieved most of that with existing DNS, HTTP and RSS implementations. All they really needed was some file formats and some well known URL schems and all of this could have been far easier to implement and deploy.
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It is not, but I have used Claude to edit it.
Claude is an excellent proofreader, but don't let a single word it generates hit your final copy. Use it to catch things and point things out, and for nothing more.
I’ll keep that in mind, thanks!
Why?
It's good at spotting stuff, like:
* Overusing verbs
* Poor structure
* Bad transitions between grafs
* Passive voice
And even bigger-picture stuff, like "you might want to zoom in here" or "this section isn't paying off". I've only in the past few months started using it for proofreading, and it's pretty solid.
But if you take any of its words, you're infecting your writing with Claude's tone, and it will show.
It's super useful as a reader of your writing. It's a terrible collaborator, unless you're writing for an audience of middle managers.
I’ve always had a sophisticated vocabulary, now people think my content is AI generated. Frown.
Vocabulary is only part of it. LLM style is pretty recognizable, and most people don’t normally write like that. One reason is because they’re trained in a lot of marketing material, news articles, and the like. If it sounds like a self-unaware middle manager writing on LinkedIn, but it isn’t one, it’s probably an LLM.
The guy you are responding to has "All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved." in his HN profile....
Sounds like a hedge against Agentic bots.
Pangram itself looks like it was just generated by Google AI Studio.
This app flags "'s infrastructure" as a hallmark of AI-generated prose. Other markers of AI generation include "'s not just", "making it", "'t just" (33x more likely in AI!), and "ecosystem".
I don't think it's trustworthy.
Pangram seems like a useful service for the world we are going to face. To me the semicolon-newline pair reminds of AI almost immediately. I am surprised that this service didn’t point that out. It could be just to me this pattern is bothering though.
> His answer:
"Where X actually lives" is a new hallmark of AI writing. I've noticed it a lot lately.
This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that you can use for free is nauseating.
This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate.
If you don't like that, go elsewhere.
If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get.
In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.
I do advocate for using other networks (specifically Nostr) that are not designed like this, but the network effect is big and most of my friends are on Blue Sky because they have been lured into a false sense of “it’s decentralised, I can just move! If something bad happens”.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code