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Jay here: this is a transition I've been working towards for awhile, and I'm looking forward to advancing the vision and ecosystem as CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Toni has been an advisor to us for years, and I personally recruited him to take over as CEO while I focus on new projects within the company. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.

Question about Bluesky and Persona integration. As i understand there are plans to delegate government id verifications to Persona? (https://withpersona.com)

Any confirmation? Comments?

Jay please answer this.

Did you notice that not one company who implemented KYC has answered any comment on this in HN?

Thanks for commenting on here. I do own bluesky account, but it's been dormant, shamefully. So I appreciate your comment on HN!

Can folks, including me, have hints what sorts of innovative features or changes we will see?

If there was an Internet Technology hall of fame, your work with atproto would qualify.

One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.

Good luck!

FYI, There is absolutely an Internet Hall of Fame and anyone would be welcome to nominate Jay! https://www.internethalloffame.org

Since you're now focusing on the AT protocol, will E2EE/OTR become a priority?

There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a

Is there any discussion somewhere about adding in the data that makes the x.com/twitter recommend/ranker so functional?

The "Grok-based Transformer"[0] that uses P(click/dwell/not_interested/photo_expand/video_view) seems pretty important and I can't tell how atproto is capturing it. I use @spacecowboy17.bsky.social‬'s For You and from what I understand that feed wouldn't get that data?

[0]:https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm?tab=readme-ov-file#sc... (this isn't an endorsement of grok/x, it's more that the transformer recommender has been very steerable via those signals in my experience)

(I also struggle with the omni-purpose likes - endorsement, approval, discover-algorithm-input. Maybe a more prominent more/less button addresses this, but then provides less network signal.)

Personally, I really like that my feeds aren't getting that level of granular detail. I prefer the explicit control I have with 'Show more like this' and 'Show less like this'.

I generally think that. But letting dwell time/clicks/open-rates expand the recommender and then (bound to swipe) 'disinterested'/'show less like this' to cull has been pretty efficient. I used to feel dumped into simclusters and now I see a more specific subset of posts I prefer (while still casting what feels like a wide net).

I really liked when bsky introduced the 'show more/less' and then expanded it to custom feeds. But I'm afraid the recommender systems work better with more data. And I think the feed operator alone gets sent a limited set of interactions?

I'm not exactly sure how it would work in atproto but I could imagine an enriched 'graph-interactivity' where you can turn on and off which/how much signal/privacy you want.

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That you for signing up to make this comment, strange, new account.

How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.

> user-antagonistic communication

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/

I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.

Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.

I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

It's a CEO's personal account. CEOs do this on Twitter all the time without it becoming a techcrunch article.

Let's just be honest about what happened - the CEO of Bluesky gave a (still not proportionally as) absurd response to an extremely absurd harassment campaign. That's what this and the article intentionally obscure.

Again, this is never how the web was supposed to work, and it (BARELY) holding on to that is the real story.

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

> They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

The more I dig into it, the more your one-sided whinging falls apart. I agree they could have handled it somewhat better, but I have very little sympathy for the terminally online bullshit that I'm seeing coming from the banned users.

Anyways, I feel we're apart on this issue. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose

Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there.

It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes.

The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

> Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

> I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there. It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes. The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

> Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.

Here is a link to your comment about not having seen it in the context of the discussion you are posting in. When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context they are not talking about a meme from several years before Bluesky existed but rather a specific event (which I have apparently failed to communicate to you).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314798

> I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.

That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

I was talking about the topic of the thread, you seem kind of focused on swearing and insulting people. My bad, I hadn’t seen your other posts and did not realize how much this subject has flustered you.

> When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context

That makes sense. The original meme was widespread and this is fairly niche.

> That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.

No man, I really mean it. Maybe it's hostile, but also, people talking about this legitimately sound, I don't know... unhinged? Off? I am flustered, because of how ridiculous this all is to me. I'm serious.

Like, "the CEO of blue sky said waffles to me and it was a 4d comedy dunk!" or whatever. It's like a Ralph Wiggum quote. What the fuck?

So, I think this topic is at its end. But really, read aloud what you wrote. Seriously, try it, you might find it grounding.

It is ok if you just didn’t/don’t know what people were talking about, I hope you are doing well.

To put my point as simply as possible for someone that isn’t ‘terminally online’ and understands that ‘posting isn’t praxis’ but also uses those phrases unprompted: People have criticized Jay for getting Poster’s Madness because of a time when she, as an admin, appeared to respond to any criticism saying everybody else has Poster’s Madness.

The offended people are the type I least respect on the internet and remember how much better it was before they existed

> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

I was in the invite only cohort of Bluesky users and I don't really think so. I think what happened is after the election a bunch of very online, political news addicted anti-Musk folks migrated to Bluesky and created the current culture. Even though I'm pretty sure most folks on the network shared pretty much the same politics, the culture on the network changed completely within a few days of this.

The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]

[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...

The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".

"Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones.

The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal. In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.

Distributing private medical information without consent is a violation of Bluesky's terms.

And to me, that sounds like a much more concrete example of someone being a bully.

>“Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others,”

Is this, quoted in the change.org, the relevant line?

The law was not broken, it is also fairly evident that the intention was not to "cause harm to others", nor has any harm has seemingly come upon the patient for this (it requires a huge stretch of imagination to think of a case in which it could)

Is it private if it is in a public affidavit?

In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private, even if it was made publicly accessible. But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private.

I'd love to see the limitations of this opinion you definitely hold honestly and without favor.

You started by posting a change.org petition that links to a deleted post - in other words an "appeal to petition" that has no evidence. Now you are suggesting there is another leak that was published (presumably not mentioned in this petition?) that also has no evidence. Where is the evidence?

Everything from an actual search engine request for these posts (which to be clear, are deleted) suggests that these are anonymized and public, and contain no identifying information.

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably be considered private.

How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service? The information was public and did not identify the person.

> But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.

I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information, or whether it was also already public knowledge, or whether it in any way identified a person.

> I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information

The new leak was, according to journalist Jesse Singal himself, absolutely private information.

Please cite Singal's statement and let's see what he actually said.

I think this entire thread has run its course; if it's not this detail, it'll be another, as a few others have already moved goalposts further down the discussion than the ones you're setting here.

But if you wish to sate personal curiosity, it is in his Substack, linked from the first link I posted, which was itself from the link posted by its GP.

Yeah here's the problem with this argument:

1. People want him banned for any and no reason, so this is a post-hoc justification. The same people (let's be real, likely including you) wanted Singal banned the second he made his account.

2. This change.org petition, despite proving how many uninformed people will blindly click agree on a petition, proves nothing about how Singal broke literally any rule anywhere, in law or on Bluesky.

Why do people keep lying about this?

He pulled a quote from a publically available affidavit.

There was no identifying information whatsoever either.

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I think Jesse Singal is an awful person, but Jay responded appropriately there.

There aren't really any, the user you're replying to is just disappointed the campaign to ban users for no (on platform, or really any) reason was not successful.

I don't care about the specific situation either way; What I am observant of is how the core team has handled their userbase and lack of protocol robustness.

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The most vocal and obnoxious of the Bluesky userbase get antagonized by pretty much anything. Pleasing that lot is a fruitless task.

What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.

What do you compare this userbase to? Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? HN? All of these places have similar or worse userbase and worse filtering/blocking options than bsky.

The users here are exactly the same, maybe worse. HN is like a subreddit

They should focus on implementing ActivityPub instead of their useless proprietary protocol

It's not "proprietary", it's openly specified and is literally being taken to IETF: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf

Also, unlike ActivityPub, it's actually useful for building features that normal people expect from social apps — for example, algorithmic feeds and search, and a single interlinked world (rather than fragmented "servers").

Eh, AP has its own sets of problems (underspecified protocol, split-brained on discoverability, new developments are met with hostility in the community)

As a startup founder, your userbase is your god. Either treat them with utmost respect, or learn to explicitly fire your customers.

If they want to remain a niche echo-chamber platform rather than become a major social network, that would be an appropriate strategy. However, I expect they have higher ambitions.

What they should also do is redesign (or remove) the "nuclear block" feature. In its current state, it helps perpetuate a hostile and exclusionary atmosphere to new users, which isn't going to help Bluesky grow an active and diverse userbase.

You have more than one user base.

You have to make hard product decisions about which user bases to serve.

Then explicitly refuse service, instead of mocking your userbase.

By... banning them? What are you suggesting?

Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.

I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:

> i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.

That was in semi private. I'd de-enohazize the expense part seirously, I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:

> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

But that is also not owning it either, and I think this is an ownable lesson in just being human too, in deciding whether online mediums are corporate, lawyer, marketing, and engineer checked reviewed approved and wise correct words, or whether there must be some permission to be ourselves online, and some expectations that people are only human, and we should be thankful they are sharing their human experiences with us or not. It's not just having fun: whether we can be ourselves online is in question. Whether that is socially allowed.

(And generally I haven't found the character of the team to be deeply off. They haven't been, in my view, going out of their way to create injury, but they have been sharing sides that people have never wanted to hear!)

I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice. Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves.

And to creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal / compsable moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement!) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility. Which is a capability atproto is truly uniquely without compare set up to support & enable.

Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no. With the good willing souls, we work towards synthesis & understanding; hopefully all sides find that agreeable.

Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.

With the new CEO in place, are there any plans to deal with the obnoxious userbase of Bluesky, and perhaps try to expand it out to reach people who don't exhibit such high levels of toxicity?

And that in comparison to Reddit ot Twitter?! :D

Yes, in the case of Twitter/X. A considerably wider range of expressed preference&opinion is permitted there before platform moderators will aggressively ban or users start flag/report brigades.

The majority of humanity is not meaningfully engaged even if they are active on social media platforms.

It has a long way to go.

As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go- it's not the fault of Graber or anyone else- but they should allow people to turn off the turbo redditor type people with a few settings.

> The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go

Fair enough

> moved back to twitter

"The summer heat in Phoenix is extremely off putting, so I moved to Riyadh"

All social media roads lead back to the same place, imo. The only thing keeping HN for getting there sooner is its lack of popularity.

> As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go

Very surprised to hear this... the few times I've visited Twitter in the last year I've been met with a deluge of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic comments. Like there's practically no moderation on there. People saying "Hitler was right the whole time" and shit like that.

I don't use Bluesky much either but I definitely wouldn't have considered it worse than Twitter

Twitter still attracts top quality initial posts from prominent people, even though the replies are garbage, or worse. Honestly, it doesn't compute to me how people can justify continuing to contribute there.

Its not worse than twitter. It's not close in compared to toxicity; though i've personally noticed a high-minded snobbishness toxicity that shuts down discussion on it.

Since when is the ability for someone to say what they want to say on the internet, a bad thing? You don't have to agree with the sentiment that Hitler was right, but that doesn't mean migrating to a platform that bans such speech is the next best alternative. I'm also not pretending X / Twitter promotes free speech, but they are certainly better than BlueSky in that regard. Free speech is free speech and you might not like what someone else is saying, but I'm sure you hold dear the right to say whatever you want, whether others agree with it or not.

Edit: The people downvoting without commenting are exactly the type of people BlueSky attracts. They can't handle others having different opinions and need safe spaces carved out for them via moderation, but will willingly spout off their own opinions endlessly and complain about anyone that doesn't adopt their worldview.

The response was to someone commenting the discourse on Bluesky was "off putting" so they went back to Twitter.

I wasn't touching on freedom of speech, just the relative quality of speech in both platforms.

As a centralized service operating in Canada and the EU though, I do believe Twitter is legally required to remove certain kinds of hate speech. The qualification for removal might be debatable (e.g. "the Austrian painter was right" is another thing people say which is a dogwhistle, but probably not explicit enough for companies to be compelled to remove it) but the requirement is there.

> but I'm sure you hold dear the right to say whatever you want, whether others agree with it or not

You know, reflecting back on my youth, I wish certain things I said (and might have posted on social media had it been so present) were immediately stricken from the record. Banning hate speech which incites violence against a minority group is a slippery slope, but I think it's for the better. At the same time, of course it can be abused, such as with the IHRA definition of antisemitism used in many jurisdictions, under which many valid criticisms of Israel would be deemed "antisemitic"

You basically can, can't you, with it's robust blocking features and feeds?

Personally, I've found bsky has a far healthier culture than Twitter, even before Musk turned it into his own personal megaphone/therapist and neo-nazi safe-space (and I follow a lot of political accounts)

The lack of payouts for engaging posts and the robust blocking really does change the incentive structure over there. That twitter-style toxic engagement-bait type posting doesn't get rewarded as much.

There are some far-left groups there who are very toxic and will harass some people, but they are easy to block. Most of them seem to block people at the drop of a hat anyways, and so end up in their own isolated bubbles.

This is a valid question. I agree politically with a lot of Bluesky users and still find it to be an awful space to hang out in.

I agree, I'm sorry to say.

I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.

At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.

It's insufferable, yes. Even though I'm a left-liberal, it feels foreign to me. Twitter is worse at the limit (endless neo-Nazis and Maoists) but at least I feel some diversity while I'm there. Bluesky is so uniform in the annoyingness of its community.

Yeah its the same plans Elon has for X

Hi Jay,

It's my understanding that Toni was so uninterested in bsky that his account was inactive. What makes Toni the right person at the helm, even in the interim?

You did such amazing things. I'm excited to see what you do next.

I'm glad you were able to reach your goal, been following your professional journey since I met you at a silicon valley event 10 years ago, looking forward to what you do with the ecosystem

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Er, I don't know if she's discussed this elsewhere, but I don't think Jay is trans.

Why did you deliberately steal Mastodon’s thunder? Why don’t you support ActivityPub?

ActivityPub does not solve any of the stated goals of atproto.

Comparing ActivityPub with atproto is like pitting Email against Web. These are just differently shaped solutions to differently shaped problems.

What thunder? Mastodon has had nearly a decade to go mainstream and it's still mostly tech enthusiasts explaining to their friends what an 'instance' is.

ActivityPub is fine if you enjoy your identity being held hostage by whatever random server admin decides to keep the lights on. Want to move servers? Hope you're cool with losing your followers. Want real account portability? Too bad. Want scalable search and flexible moderation? Also too bad.

ATproto wasn't built to compete with Mastodon out of pettiness, it was built because ActivityPub fundamentally cannot accomplish the task that ATProto/Bluesky is aiming for: a decentralized social network that isn't a cumbersome pain in the ass to use.

How many Bluesky servers are there?

With ActivityPub you have to build... actual relationships with people (yes also those that do the work and walk the walk!)

I know that for Twitter-brained people this is considered an anti-feature (and yes account mobility is an issue), but a PITA to use it really is not

I made my account on a server that a personal friend span up. Said friend deleted it on a whim after a few months after not using it much, not really aware of the implications. Personal connection was not the issue here, ownership of my digital identity was.

Besides, people sometimes have fallings-out.

Is the new blocking age verification page the kind of innovation we should expect from BlueSky?

Counterpoint - its a legal requirement in several parts of the world now (and rapidly expanding), how do you think they should handle it whilst you know...still being able to exist?

It's not a legal requirement in my country. Thus they are volunteering to go extra mile in the implementation of the repressive laws.

I think they should resist as much as possible. Yes it was a legal requirement to gas the Jews and it was illegal to hide them.

Who do we cheer now? Those who abided to the law or those who broke it?

It was supposed to be decentralised though, meaning there would be no central party to pursue.

Sure, which is why it's perfectly possible to work around those restrictions using any of the alternative apps that show the same data (but don't implement the legal restrictions).

How long until it KYC at bluesky becomes a centralized requirement?

It is. The block is on the client level, not the network.

What makes you think a nation state level entity can't pursue in this case...?

The same reason even nation state actors have not managed to eradicate torrents. You take one tracker down, another pops back up.

I don't know why people have to be like this. Are you not capable of asking the question without the aggressive snark? Just be cool for a second and maybe you'll get an actual conversation where you learn something.

I live in a country where this is not a legal requirement. Yet my account was blocked due to no birthdate.

This makes me have zero respect for those who volunteer to go the extra mile in the implementation of repressive laws.

Like X .. BlueSky is great for porn on your mobile as I refuse to go to any porn sites on my phone. The popups and adware/etc uggh!

This move came from Jay so that she could focus more on the atproto ecosystem and forward looking development. Personally, I'm happy for her. The CEO role gets extremely wrapped up in operations & org building, and as a technologist I'm not sure it would be for me.

I've met with Toni a couple of times and he seems really excellent. He was CEO of Automattic (Wordpress) from 2006 to 2014, and that means a fair amount of expertise making an open-source-first company work. He cares about an open internet and protocol, and seems very keen to drive the mission forward.

For a little extra assurance, atproto is hopefully quite close to establishing an IETF working group, and the DID PLC Directory is likewise close to establishing the independent entity. Our priorities for an open network are unchanged.

There is a very common inflection point in companies where the CEO needs to be about maintaining what is built instead of growing forever. You cannot, for instance, when you have 60% market share expect the company to keep growing linearly. The people who do end up stooping to questionable means to grow new markets they have no business growing, like for instance children.

Some orgs will go through three, from founder, to growth, to sustaining.

The WordPress analogy is actually pretty apt here given Toni's background. Automattic went through exactly this - Matt stayed as the visionary/product guy while bringing in operators to handle the scaling side. And WordPress is arguably one of the most successful open source projects in terms of actual mainstream adoption.

The tricky part with Bluesky is figuring out which phase they're even in. 40M signups sounds like growth phase, but the retention numbers tell a different story. They might need a sustaining CEO before they've actually finished growing, which is an awkward spot to be in.

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We don't need "open" networks (Digital Panopticons), we need private networks.

Both are good

What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.

We already could've done that before, just throw a HTML file on a HTTP server on a cheap VPS

That's pretty much what atproto is, except it's typed JSON rather than HTML, and HTTP+WebSockets to allow aggregation.

I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

and I actually don't hate that bit (I really like lexicons, although I might have approached it in a different way) - what I hate is the aggregation layer. I know that it is possible to have an AppView-less atproto app (e.g. RedDwarf), but I feel like much of the ecosystem still defaults to the assumption that it will go through the Bluesky AppView.

Unrelated apps (https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, http://semble.so/) don't go through Bluesky Appview (since they need aggregations of different kind of data). I think aggregation is the only model that can compete with centralized services on UX, but of course different apps would need different backends.

You may be confusing the Relay, a protocol component run by Bluesky, with the Bluesky AppView

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

This is like saying anyone can open a lemonade stand in Mogadishu.

We have never had an online open public space where each of us has our voice, can shape our experience, can use our own compsable moderation, can integrate with whatever apps we choose.

How, in spite of having no data on what it would be like, people are so confident that leaving shared open connected mediums behind is the only way to go is such a mystery to me.

The radio station I'm on just played a modem tone, Mountain Chill Radio. But I was already gearing up to write what an amazing era this has been, how incredible a rise it has been that we can connect & talk, with so many people. My dialtone travels so much further & that is glorious. I have no idea, feel like I would have no chance to build a good private network for myself, that my life would stagnante and closed, if I had to build my networks myself in private, smuggling the light of my soul to others rather than being able to let it out.

I am happy to be online. I am proud of my "data", my voice, my app records. There's some less pleasant less shiny corners! But it is mad incredible that I get to do this live, that I get to have so many edges of connection and serendipity. People provide the most wild interesting comments and suggestions and topics, ongoingly. I benefit so much from them sharing their lives.

I spiritually believe deeply that we have our light to share with the universe. To turn your nose up at sharing, to renounce & see only evil, to let the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, this spectre of the closed/bad/no-good controlling systems shape our thinking here is a pandora's box: I say you are shutting the door right as hope is finally trying to get out.

Who is this "we" and where can I read their opinions?

Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.

Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former.

From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment.

[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.

>Twitter's demise

I just checked https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 and X (formerly twitter) is the #1 news app followed by substack, CrimeRadar Dispatch Audio, and coming in at 4th place is reddit.

So if twitter's dead, what does that make reddit, 3 spots behind it? Well, not dead, obviously. Pretending that twitter is gone or dead is just not rational behavior.

While still in business, X is shrinking fast (https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-user-decline-in-uk-...) and sliding in the rankings, where it is well behind Reddit and LinkedIn, and even behind Pinterest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...).

I'm not saying it's "fully dead", but it clearly lost the cultural relevance and impact it once had.

That's a two year old article and X is the #1 news app today. How can you possibly construe that as "shrinking fast" if two years later it's in the top spot literally today? It seems like wishful thinking on your part rather than being reasonable based on first principles and the data at hand, from where I'm sitting.

The ranking compiled on Wikipedia is from a couple months ago. X is now behind Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn (and of course, the major social players). Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?

BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.

Again, the ranking from Apple is from today. Not "a couple months ago". And again, it's #1 while reddit is #4. So which is incorrect, Apple, or Wikipedia? It has to be one of them.

>Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?

Because you've Motte & Balley'd twice now, each time in the direction of downplaying X's success. Because X is objectively doing great. #1st place is objectively great.

>BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.

Are any of those news apps? This is the third Mott & Bailey. Again in the direction of denigrating X with bad data. So first principles and neutral data sourcing cannot be the reason for the inaccuracies - I dare say lies. It's flailing at this point.

Putting a lot of weight on a single data point there. How does Apple even choose the top apps? Why assume it’s some reliable metric for use?

The discussion is about trends, and the most recent datapoint shows it at a point of primacy when the argument was it was in decline two years ago. Clearly that claim was incorrect.

For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.

And it should well stay dead. Short form social media is just too good a fit for outrage farming.

Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr

Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"

The censorship now is worse than what happened to Bhattacharya.

Court orders are different from psyops. The Bhattacharya thing, and the entire narrative around that stuff was essentially a psyop. Geo-restricting a Turkish politician because the authoritarian govt arrested him and gave a court order to restrict his account is - first of all - what all social media platforms must adhere to legally, and second of all is currently being contested by X in court.

One of Twitter's strengths was that it was a constructive community where near services & informational/radiative bots chilled. It was a connective fabric, it made information available.

That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.

Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.

Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.

I remember being in 20 years old, at the start of my career, and complete broke. I thought Twitter was just a toy website, until one day I radically changed my mind.

I was a customer of a bank that treated me with nothing but contempt. Whenever I called the bank because of a problem, I would stay on the line forever to eventually talk to an unbothered representative. One day, instead of calling, I complained on twitter and tagged the bank. Half an hour later the bank apologised and fixed my problem.

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Elon Musk is all of those things personally (see: that heil-handing incident), and it's public knowledge that he made the Twitter engineering team amplify his own posts.[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...

No. Many other public figures have raised their hands this way on video. You’re probably aware of this but choose to perpetuate the lie anyway.

In addition your own article regarding debugging the reach issue doesn’t support your conspiracy theory about Musk boosting tweets for his own ego.

> “Twitter’s system has historically promoted tweets from users whose posts perform better to both followers and non-followers in the For You Tab; Musk’s tweets should have fit that model but showed up less only about half the time that some engineers thought they should, according to some internal estimates,” Platformer wrote.

> Many other public figures have raised their hands this way on video

Lol. If you really believe this, try doing it on a busy street, and watch the responses you get.

The comment you quote but don’t quite seem to have fully understood mentions that people have done it in arenas filled with thousands of people to the response of widespread applause.

If you really don’t believe it I took the time of doing five seconds of research: https://youtu.be/XteSVPzL3fk?is=6J4V3GhqNvh-PhGI

Twitter's main problem wasn't the network, but fElon Musk running amok.

It was the censorship. Which isn't gone, but is way less restrictive than it was. And I've actually started seeing bangers (auto) translated from Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese lately, which is fantastic. I don't really want an English hivemind. I want to see what the whole world thinks. It's kinda fantastic tbh.

Who needs censorship when you have an algorithm to feed people what you want them to see and you've self-selected for only people who aren't morally opposed to the new site?

Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.

>Who needs censorship when you have an algorithm to feed people what you want them to see and you've self-selected for only people who aren't morally opposed to the new site?

It feeds you what you engage with, and it changes surprisingly quickly. It caught onto my ARC raiders interest almost instantly. I engaged with a Portuguese post once, and now I get wonderful translated posts in Spanish, French, and Arabic too.

>Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.

What evidence could you possibly have that I'm not? There's lots of "politically incorrect" things which is a symptom of low filtration. Besides, you can't have seen my feed. Completely baseless allegation. So what's the real reason for taking the anti-X stance?

> There's lots of "politically incorrect" things which is a symptom of low filtration.

Politically incorrect things might be a symptom of low filtration on almost any other site, but not one run by Elon Musk. He has a clear agenda and is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X. It's so blatant and well documented that it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.

>Politically incorrect things might be a symptom of low filtration on almost any other site,

Why would that change anything? I've always found political incorrectness to be a symptom of free speech.

>but not one run by Elon Musk.

Why would that be any different? Same symptom. Same free speech as far as I can tell.

>He has a clear agenda

What's the agenda?

>is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X.

What instances of him putting his finger on the scale do you have? He gets community noted hilariously often.

>It's so blatant

What makes it blatant?

>well documented

By people who clearly hate the man and have lost their ability to reason over it. Like the ones who lost the narrative control of twitter.

>it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.

Having different opinions than you isn't bad faith. I brought up that the censorship is better than before (but still not great), and mentioned some cool new developments I've seen. You've attempted to steer the conversation to be about Elon Musk or myself. These are both ad hominem attacks, which is textbook bad faith.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

If you think censorship is gone, try to talk about Israel's apartheid in Palestine and see how far you get.

What are you talking about? X is full of this shit, how can you claim that this gets censored when it is EVERYWHERE?

Show the class where you talked about it on X and it didn't get censored.

Of course, but the damage was done.

That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)

This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)

Even if the stats are off by a factor of 10 it wouldn't matter. You could remove the numbers from the user axis entirely and it would paint the same story: there were massive user influxes after the 2024 US election and the inauguration in January, but user retention has been on a steep decline for the year+ since.

Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.

Strong agreement, though I would say it looks to have reached a stable level for now. I've found several subcommunities that I can get good info from. I'm curious how the '26 election cycle will affect things, already seeing increase political discourse.

I don't think it's quite stable. The external events that caused waves of new users to arrive from X are getting rare and bringing in fewer. When those aren't happening it's been a slow, gradual decline.

> From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine

As long as you have the bluesky approved opinions you’re fine but if you suggest something that is normal and mainstream like not wanting illegal immigration, you will immediately receive death threats.

> approved opinions

Same exact shit here but the censorship is worse

>From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine

From a content perspective nothing important is permitted to be discussed there. It's just another hivemind with the exact same opinions as reddit and HN. Completely pointless and nothing more than the output of a temper tantrum over not getting to be the censors in charge and the whole world knows it.

He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.

Fair enough, I've never been involved in a CEO recruitment, I can't imagine the candidate pool tends to include people like the previous CEO of Bluesky

It's not that unusual to have an interim CEO hold the reins (read: sign anything that needs the CEO's signature) while a permanent one is found.

That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.

Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.

Apologies, I'm probably under a rock, but why is that bad? I see they're behind WordPress but am not sure what the 1:1 is. The WP Engine stuff?

There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back.

Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.

Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. It looks like Toni Schneider left in 2014.

Toni was in fact the adult supervision brought in by Automattic’s board when the company was young and Matt was inexperienced.

And apparently adult supervision was needed.

And still needed...

"Some drama"...yeah, the way there was drama between Germany and the Soviet Union back in 1941.

Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.

They'd already taken VC money hadn't they? It's got to be said though that tech startups are getting very formulaic. Monster of the week vibes.

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They put it quite plainly indeed:

> As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution

Translation: enshittification

That’s the other shoe where they will iterate on ways to monetise the party. Ads, paid “verification”, making users pay to use atproto apps (or making developers pay to use the managed storage)… the sky is the limit.

In a way I’m happy Bluesky never took root and outside a few enthusiasts in my bubble it’s practically unknown.

To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success.

Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.

And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.

But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.

> Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.

The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.

Why is that bad?

thats not a good sign

Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter.

Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model.

The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.

The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

This comment seems to be saying you don't want most people to do blog-like things. Most social media from Facebook to Youtube is blog-like if you squint.

It does seem like fewer people are posting personal content that way lately. Perhaps most people are better off sharing things one to one, or in small groups that are meant to stay private. That doesn't make it bad for the more public formats to exist; they're just not for everyone.

> The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete.

The internet is forever, don't want it propagated? Don't post it.

> Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it.

Probably because they cannot truly guarantee or enforce it.

But at proto is equally open? You can also just save all of at proto.

You can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation.

I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.

Once you hit publish, it's public and anyone and everyone can save a copy and distribute it. If you don't like that, don't hit publish.

ATProto won't be this way for much longer. Permissioned data is coming and will not be broadcast or accessible without grants. This will sit next to the public data, but separate.

So ATProto is about to die, in other words.

It was already wayyy too complex. And this? Yeah, they (you? sorry) really need to just give it up.

I think it's important to remember that decentralization is a barrier to having control over your data. If you're going to participate in these systems, you should treat everything you do as permanent, because by design you will not be in control of where that data is stored.

You can care a lot about plausible deniability and the ability to delete your own data, but it seems a bit weird to denounce a whole ecosystem as "generally a bad idea" on those grounds, when that is a deliberate anti-goal of the system design.

Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.

"Don't use it if you don't like it" is not a sufficient response here, because the gathering and verifying of personal data is NOT PURELY AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM. You might post about me. Etc.

Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."

The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.

There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.

Exactly. And I'm willing to be that Bluesky folk might be somewhat similar because they haven't figured it out yet.

Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.

Mastodon doesn’t give you any real privacy. If I’m posting on something twitter like I want as much reach as possible. Sorry bud, we’re not actually all dumb naive people who haven’t seen the light.

I'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope.

As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).

Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.

No they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Yes they are? E.g., https://api.backlinko.com/app/uploads/2025/11/bluesky-websit...

This is also visible in your stats if you extend the time window. They had a peak in 2024 and are pretty much declining month to month ever since.

Are we seeing the same? All the stats are steadily going down https://i.imgur.com/QJakG56.png

I’d describe that last six months as ‘sideways’ —- what was that surge near the end of last year?

I believe that surge was Elon announcing AI image editing on X and a bunch of Japanese artists and their followers trying out Bluesky.

My understanding was the end of year time off / holidays, as compared to the dip around thanksgiving.

Jaz's stats are sus, use this instead: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/index.html

Ah, I didn't realize the link I shared was Jaz's (it was shared in another comment), but they look similarly sideways over the past 6 months, with a noticeable bump in Dec / Jan.

Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.

More IRL time with other people hopefully.

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We may have different interests and networks. Pretty much everyone I know has moved on. I don't even look at it any longer.

I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.

Good point. For sake of argument, how about this stratification of privacy levels:

twitter/x/bluesky - a big tech company owns your data

mastodon - a grassroots community organization owns your data

zulip - someone you've met personally owns the data

your blog - you own the data

(and yes these are a bit of a category error, but to achieve privacy maybe we should broaden the category and sacrifice reach)

Well, the problem is, now the word "owns" isn't really helpful either?

Because you have "possesses" (which can be anyone) vs. "controls?"

Twitter - single point of big company external control

Mastodon - One or multiple unverifiable fallible likely grassroots, points of external control

Bluesky - Once out, merely the illusion of control, because your data is out there, verifiable?.

>You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

The entire point of a platform like Twitter / Bluesky is reach, not privacy.

Posts and discussions there are meant to be public, and highly visible.

It's not that people don't care. It's that this is not what the platform is for.

What's important for a platform like that is not even anonymity, but functional pseudonymity.

And that thing is on its way to the effectively outlawed with the push for "age verification".

People do notice it and leave [1], but at some point, there might be no place to go to.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodb...

I 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea.

But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this.

And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable.

ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier.

If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

I am on a bunch of socials but as time goes by I like my cohort on Mastodon better and better.

Many a Discord server would agree

deleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best

there is just no way to police what happens to data that is broadcast, which doesn't remove control away from the reader

it's annoying because in the abstract it's something everybody has the potential to need and need badly, but if you're afraid to put something out there to your name/pseudonym you really shouldn't

What? You don't even need to understand how Mastodon works in depth to realize that sending a post to 500 different servers owned by completely different people in completely different jurisdictions is going to make it harder to delete later.

Sure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.

Seems like the solution is to either not incriminate yourself online or get plausible deniability with a pseudonym.

I've found lately that between age gating and twitter being - well I don't want to get into it - I am no longer looking for replacements - I just want to stop using those parts of the internet.

Now I am down to file sharing, email and functions related to my job, a little youtube - but trying to ween myself of that. The internet as I knew it is dead.

YouTube is absolutely flourishing when it comes to quality content. It‘s the only UGC platform I use anymore. Besides the only thing I consume on the internet at this point is the news and check HN once or twice a week.

If you follow live sports then Twitter is still unparalleled because people (and broadcasters too) upload highlights in near real time. Every event, goal, home run, crash etc.

They are aware:

https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...

Job opening to build sports relationships.

For high-level football/calcio/soccer at least, Reddit is and has been better for a long time. Often goal and other key highlights are uploaded before the broadcasters.

There's an absolute ton of niches which are completely anchored to Twitter. It's hard to get a whole raft of people to move at once :(

This is massively true and was the last thing that I had to overcome when dropping Twitter. Certain sports have better engagement than others but it is pretty staggering the difference. If BlueSky could figure that out then they would have a legitimate shot at substantial success

>If BlueSky could figure that out

It's a "people problem" not a technical one. For example if you are following anything from Asia, or just generally from Japan and Korea you will most likely see it on Twitter, there was never a big exodus of users there. Bsky has almost 0 engagement. Just watching WBC this week and I wanted to see korean highlights of their games. They are all over on Twitter, nothing on Bsky.

True, but the BlueSky audience is not really into following professional sports. I believe there was statistics (or just rumor) showing that conservative-leaning people are about 50% more likely to follow professional sports than liberal-leaning people. Sadly, I cannot find the source, but it might be so obvious that nobody bothered to run a proper poll. Or this is just what everybody believes so everybody goes with it.

Are there tools that let users post to both simultaneously? (e.g. similar to how streamers can simultaneously stream to Twitch/YT/X easily)

A lot of bluesky users don't really go outside ;^)

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Elon Mush has introduced political biais in the algo, not all opinions are worth the same when you have a white suprematicst at the reign.

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Why does the very existence of bluesky make so many people angry? You're free to stay at the Nazi bar if that's where you're comfortable.

Musk is openly and heavy handedly messing with the recommendation algorithm to fit whatever views he wants to push. On top of that, he started paying people for their viral tweets, which promotes content farms and rage bait.

It is not a place that is trying to showcase diverse opinions in an unbiased way.

Why would I use a social network run by someone with opinions straight from the pages of Stormfront? I don't need white supremacy mixed in with my light recreational reading, thanks.

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If you truly believe "those days" are over, you're in for a depressing few decades as the world moves on without you. Most reasonable people — even white people like myself — are disgusted by the sort of rhetoric that Musk retweets and endorses on a daily basis[1]. It is, without any exaggeration, literal Stormfront shit as I remember from a decade ago. We will fight this putrid garbage and we will win.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...

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Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.

Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.

It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is.

I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...

Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server.

I believe, due to the format of engagement, its easy to spend a lot of time there scrolling - so consider

(1) only using the platform on your desktop computer, instead of phone,

(2) limiting time - 25 minutes a day is enough!

(3) Mute spammers, complainers, people with negative attiudes - you can't catch them all, but you can intentionally shape your experience over time.

(4) Subscribe to tags of your passions (example: #piano, #makerspace, #drawing, #cats, #jujitsu, #cncrouter, #3dprinting), and try to lean into that instead of getting caught up in endless political reactions - which never ends. You can be intentional, and subscribe to people who have a positive vision for the version of the future you prefer.

> Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations

Same, more or less. Twitter started as a place to be interrupted by attention-seekers, and Bluesky was just "that but with less Elon Musk and more implementation throat-clearing." I never saw the point. Mastodon feels more like old-school Usenet, where you could find communities with shared interests, block the attention-seekers, and shrug at the usual human drama.

Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I certainly don't need a billion users. I think I'd be happy with 100,000 users -- what is your number?

I think this is related to the question of how big of a city do you need to live in before you can find something to do and are not bored living there. I'm fine with a city of, say, 50,000-100,000. That is more than sufficient for me to find an appropriate number of likeminded friends and neighbors as well as interesting pursuits.

> Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's a mailing list for friends and family, sure. But not if it's 20 randomly-selected strangers from around the world.

So the critical mass to make the "random stranger" type of a social network work is much, much higher than the number of daily interactions you need to keep coming back.

Yes, all you use is 20, but as the number increases the odds of you finding your 20 goes up. I'm saying in 100,000 roughly randomly selected people, I have basically a 100% chance of finding my 20. 50,000 is probably enough.

By the way, if your number is not the same as mine, I am not intimating that this makes you deficient in some way. Everyone has their own number.

Yeah and for me it should be mainly people like me. That's really what we do, we now live in a world that's too big for our minds to encompass, so we build little villages with like-minded people.

Some people call that bubbles, I call it sanity. I try not to spend my time giving out about the other side though. It just gives me negative energy.

> It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Bluesky and Mastodon users can interact with each other (provided both parties opt in). I'm on Mastodon, but I see my friend's messages (he's on BlueSky) and vice versa. My replies show on up on BlueSky and vice versa.

I would love to see that work, but every time I've tried to set that up, it seems to fail. The bridges seem unreliable and non-responsive when trying to set them up or diagnose issues with them.

I use https://fed.brid.gy/

It works. It has poor documentation, though so it took a few attempts to figure it out.

For example if you don't have a profile image it won't work.

That's exactly what I've tried to get working, several times. I show up on bsky with zero posts, and I can't follow folks from bsky.

As solid as the goals of Bluesky were from a technology perspective, the political driver of the user acquisition has the platform in the same category as Truth Social: political echo chambers. Two sides of the same coin. It's unfortunate because I don't think the branding is going away.

Mastodon has been great for tech communities in my experience though.

Sometimes I think more the toxic people who wrote about politics and identity on Mastodon moved on to Bluesky when Trump got elected.

I don’t see why it is “zero” sum, nothing stops you from posting to more than one social. I mean, I have relatives on Facebook and no prospect for getting them to change so I cut-n-paste what I posted on Mastodon to Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all sorts of places.

Bluesky won over Mastodon because the fedi model is fundamentally flawed in its UX. For a flood of people wamting "Twitter without Nazis", Bluesky was a good match. I don't think Dorsey had anything to do with it, because the influx happened after he'd already severed all ties.

Some people are getting introduced to similar and in some ways worse UX on Bluesky now that there are some actual efforts to make it slightly less centralized.

"Mastodon already won, by being used by people" I'm sorry what

Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.

https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a

What did Mastodon win exactly?

Threads being the biggest Mastodon instance and federating with mastodon.social (Meta signed contracts with instance maintainers to do so) and the other 3 largest instances (Pawoo, baragg (d_o_t) net, and mstdn (d-o-t) jp) taking up more that >70% of the total users using it?

That doesn't sound good.

The CEO sold all of us out and was the only one that made real money on Mastodon.

In what world did the Mastodon CEO made money out of Mastodon beside the small public salary he's been taking? You are making things up.

> In what world did the Mastodon CEO made money out of Mastodon beside the small public salary he's been taking?

Here on Earth, Europe, Germany, Berlin, Mastodon GmbH.

So he didn't tell you that he got a €1M one-off payment from Mastodon? [0]

> You are making things up.

It is true. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/mastodon-ceo-steps-down-as...

I won't doubt your statistics. In practice, my experience is that it really is distributed.

I just went to my feed (only people I follow), and although mastodon.social showed up a few times, the majority of users I interact with are on distinct servers. So out of 20 people, I see 17 different servers.

My feed will not be impacted much if mastodon.social dies.

Toni is very well regarded among Automattic employees. I'm personally stoked to see him work on Bluesky.

Almost all of social media right now is terrible. Each is a little faction of whatever echo chamber controls it mixed in with the most engagement hungry garbage you can imagine.

BlueSky is vastly worse than Twitter/X now or ever was. It was a good idea, but it ruins the "community square" aspect when BlueSky has just become a total echo chamber. Twitter is still diverse, even if voices that were once banned now have bigger platforms. Now I'd rank BlueSky has a net negative for society. It's basically a DailyKos leaning miniblog with a small userbase. Things you would just used to find in comment sections of left leaning sites.

You rank Bluesky as a net negative for society and a rank what’s become ann alt-right propaganda service as diverse? Interesting. No thanks.

There are plenty of opinions on X. Are you just upset that there are diverse political opinions on there now?

I agree with GP. Twitter does have diverse viewpoints across progressive, centrist, and right wing voices. I abhor the alt-right stuff, and it is more widespread now under new ownership. However BlueSky is exclusively urban lefties. It's not diverse

> and proved that a values-driven social network could thrive at scale.

How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?

"values-driven" is the TedTalk-ified equivalent of MBA-speak like "synergy". Meaningless and unmeasurable, but sounds good in a pitch deck.

This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.

The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.

We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.

The only value driving most things you see online is the value of money. Which is not the kind of values they are referring to.

Values aren't the only motivator, unless you take an extremely broad definition of values.

Yeah, the value of money is ironically usually not what we mean with ”values”.

I suppose in the same way that all eating is health and nutrition driven. Good or bad.

Seriously? If a company is publicly traded, they're legally required to prioritize shareholder value, unless they're a benefit corp or something with multiple bottom lines. I suppose you could call it values-driven to drive up the bottom line, but that's not normally what people mean.

IANAL but no, executives are not actually legally required to increase shareholder value.

They generally are aiui. Bluesky was formed as a PBC, which is basically a corporation where investors cannot sue for deralict of fiduciary duty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Judgme...

Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification

The section you linked to says the decision was non-binding, and the next section includes multiple quotes disputing the idea that such a legal requirement exists.

You know how there are two sexual orientations: straight, and Political?

It’s sort of like that.

Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.

They constantly say they are a Public benefit corporation but there is no actual difference between that an a corporation. This leads to people assuming some kind of benevolence.

Wrong. B Corp boards are legally protected from lawsuits if they reject the highest bid when they put the company up for sale. In a C Corp, once the board puts the company on the auction block, not taking the highest bid, even from a company that's diametrically opposed to the goals of the C Corp, opens the board up to lawsuits from shareholders pissed about not getting the maximal return. Suggesting this is no difference shows a lack of understanding of the legal regime these types of corporations operate under.

If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.

There is an actual difference

No there isnt.

Yes true.

B Corps allow the board to weigh things besides shareholder value. That's a meaningful distinction.

The idea is that shareholder primacy isn't compatible with everything every corporation wants to do, so having a board that's protected from lawsuits when they put things above shareholders is a useful thing and B Corps offer that.

The board can, for example, reject a "superior" takeover bid without fear of lawsuits from shareholders pissed off they didn't get the biggest payday available. A typical C Corp's board MUST take the highest offer, and not doing so WILL get them sued. That means if GoodGuy B Corp is about to be taken over by BadGuy Inc., the GoodGuy board can say "No, they're not compatible with the public benefit mission we incorporated under so we're not going to accept their offer." That's actually really useful.

Nah, that's Nostr. fiatjaf created it but doesn't hold any actual authority. All the extensions are community-driven.

You're thinking of mastodon, and even that had a lead: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/mastodon_ceo_steps_do...

I'm not going to speak for OP, but I definitely remember it also being a rallying cry for Bluesky too. "No one person can control the network blah blah blah"

That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.

The term they use for this is "credible exit" - designing the entire protocol such that if the company itself misbehaves the affected users can leave to a separate instance without losing their relationships or data.

Bluesky's claims of being decentralised were always way way ahead of the de-facto reality of it. That's not the same as Mastodon.

It has been a "rallying cry" but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny of how Bluesky actually functions: an "open protocol" with one central server means little. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, and maybe it is changing, see https://blacksky.community/ . But this is not the same as Mastodon, where it's been that way for a while.

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Ahhh yup, wondered how long it'd take before this happened. Sorry to sound like THAT guy, but I'm glad I deleted my account ages ago. I liked BS and it seemed good but yea, here comes Twitter 3.0

Clickbaity headline: Seems more accurate to stay stepping to the left, instead of stepping down. Stepping down implies leaving the company, which is not the case as Jay is moving into the Chief Innovation Officer role.

Cue 3 months to the “I’m having to make some hard decisions” email. Whats the board at Bluesky like?

Post from new CEO Toni Schneider https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...

There's only a single non-platitude in the entire letter, but luckily it provides us with a wealth of information about what's coming next:

> I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years

> PS: My role as interim CEO will be to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.

This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.

What is it that doctors call growth at any cost? Cancer?

The brand already has a defined public perception that will be hard to change, even for those who've only heard it by name (eg Fox News). As a user, I generally agree with the Blue MAGA sentiments, even though it is much more diverse than that and you can filter out political content if you want. This is likely Bluesky's biggest challenge in a return to growth.

This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.

“The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.

It's nice to be on a network that doesn't have a CEO or a board. I think this is why Nostr is really something different and more important.

it does have a similar problem to other systems in that it's so free-form there is no cohesive experience

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

I won't get fooled again!

Bluesky is very strange, it's got potential to endure as a fairly popular social media site but it's kinda obvious that it's staff are contemptuous of their users.

The intended audience was meant to be blockchain weirdos with encyclopedic knowledge of the age of consent in every state, but instead they are stuck with a core userbase of Furries and LGBT people.

They don't know how to fix this, so they'll be stuck floundering for a while to come trying and failing to return to their core mission.

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This makes sense, they've had a lot of issues with cp and have generally developed a poor reputation for their user-base and bans. It seems more like a systemic issue to me rather than a CEO issue, but I suppose all issues start at the CEO level in some regard

Agree. You'd think Musk would do something about the CSAM AI. I guess he reined it in a bit, at least.

While I definitely appreciate the sentiments of ATproto and a bit more openness of Bluesky as a platform for development fun and perks like domain verification etc...... having to relive all of the development that we went thru with Twitter for over a decade as they 'build in the open' is frustrating. The network effects are there (which are super important to break out of silos and gain explorability) a bit more thanks to the centralization and hashtags (moreso that the go nowhere Fediverse) but there's a bigger hole: say what you want about daily user numbers, so much mainstream and big accounts are just not there. From news organizations (including the ones that are there that post 'selectively') to politicians, sports like some others have mentioned, entertainment and more. Abandoned accounts, or just not there. A chunk of the conversation (or even the 'fight') and reachability of those entities, even the usefulness of having an official source on the platform for their content, is not there in many instances. And I don't know why this isn't a major focus for growth and legitimacy. Hope there's some more direction on that if you want it to be anything other than an 'escape' for left-leaning people and those looking for a bit more independence over their profiles.

I have no idea what to think of this. Especially the Automattic connection, the company with the petty tyrant running it. I would want anyone coming from there to have learned something from the failure of the WordPress Foundation since Bluesky will need some foundationing too.

Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...

They could have launched paid subscriptions, they even said they were looking into it, crickets...

Pretty much. It's fun seeing idealists get slapped by reality. If you want to protect your ideals you better know how to fight for them using the same tactics as your competitors.

Learning how to build a board that is in your favor, making alliances with less than pure players if needed, and being ruthlessly competitive allows an ideal to become reality.

You are wrong about pretty much all of that, including your assumed reasoning for why this is happening. Jay chose to change her role so she could do deeper work on the technology. That's it.

The issue is that no one really believes the corporate speak any more. Bluesky does not get a pass on this, re: VC funding

I have concerns about one piece of messaging I've seen lately, working on a writeup, stay tuned

What's fun about it?

It's like seeing your kid learn how to walk. They'll fail a couple of times, but they'll get toughen up and finally learn.

Maybe they can finally crack down on communist symbols. IDK how they haven't been investigated in most of Europe yet.

It’s a social network premised on not liking Elon Musk as far as I remember. The inverse is not true, Twitter user adoption as far as I can tell is not primarily driven by left/right political fanaticism. Not sure what reason it even has to exist.

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Translation: VCs and the board pushed Jay out.

The interim CEO doesn't even use Bluesky himself, so at this point you might as well move to Threads.

This is false, he has been on Bluesky since 2024. https://bsky.app/profile/toni.bsky.team

Last activity 17 days ago, 23 days ago, 3 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago

Dive deeper with PDSLS

https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#coll...

"17 posts" since 2024.

13 of them are reposts, and 2 of them are his own actual posts and then made 2 more posts about becoming the interim CEO of Bluesky and then "thanking" Jay.

That doesn't seem like he even uses it regularly only up until the leadership changes.

Threads? The twitter clone owned by Meta? Yeah no thanks.

… most social networks give you a “notification” if somebody follows you or engages with a post but there are two exceptions: (1) is LinkedIn which gives you a double-dose of main feed items you didn’t click on and that you never clicked on anything like ever so it’s a chance to prove their model is right… most social networks play a “ding” sound if somebody likes your post but LinkedIn dings when you post something because their standards are low. (2) Threads posts “notifications” that are somewhere between completely senseless and “political outrage of some kind but I can’t tell if they like Trump or hate Trump”

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Or if you want something actually better at the core, you can switch to nostr. It's quite easy to even implement your own client app for nostr (even more so with LLMs), so you can get the experience you want.

Yeah and nostr really is decentralised and doesn't even require providing an email address. The only thing I don't really like is the cryptobro vibe there. But technically it's really good.

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And so it begins.

Go on..

I was enjoying having one social network not run by horrid people. Maybe it's time to go back to IRC or something.

I guess I'm honored that you feel like we weren't horrid. I have gotten a very positive impression from Toni so far, fwiw.

I mean, the competition isn't setting a high bar, between the guy complaining about 'white people not having a homeland' and the other guy peddling addictive stuff to teens and AI slop to their grandparents.

That said, I have genuinely been enjoying Blue Sky. It has 'enough' for me. There are a bunch of YIMBYs and urbanists. The mayor of my city and one of my city councilors are there. There is starting to be a bike racing community. There are some good local journalists.

I read your other comment; I hope your optimism is warranted.

Same

I hesitate to write this here, but https://libera.chat is a lovely and thriving IRC server.

nostr

no sir, never gonna do crypto social media

Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.

I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX.

The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]

[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/compare/main...ver...

[2] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

bsky is going to get "freenode boyking'd" so hard. It, the maybe 300k human users, and 42.7 million bots are going to be sold and they will pull up the drawbridges.

Great example of the userbase quality to be found here: https://bsky.app/profile/patriotnicole.bsky.social/followers

This account has posted once and has over 700 followers in like an hour, which looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/hQcKDZQ.png

There are countless "patriot" "true blue" "blue heart emoji american flag emoji" accounts just like this

Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop

Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week

by what metric....

for example name the only Twitter investment that made money....

hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.