Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Bluesky feels like the big winner right now. I’ve been covering Bluesky ever since I got my invite in April 2023. I’ve felt the platform has always had promise, especially with features like feeds with custom algorithms and the ability to let users pick their own moderation filters. But for a long while, it didn’t have the critical mass of users that I could follow to make it the first social network I load up every day. Over the course of this month, that’s changed. It added 700,000 new users in a week…..Continue reading….
By: Jay Peters
Source: The Verge
.
Critics:
Bluesky is largely analogous to Twitter in its structure. Users can send 300-character text messages, images, and video in short posts. Users can reply, repost, quote post and like these posts. Frequent users have called posts on the platform “skeets”, a portmanteau of “sky” and “tweets”, despite CEO Jay Graber’s vigorous disapproval of the term.
Bluesky offers a domain name-based handle system via the AT Protocol, allowing users to self-verify an account’s legitimacy and identity by proving ownership of a domain name through a DNS text record or HTTPS page.The verification needs to be repeated as a live operation by consumers. The specification doesn’t handle changes in status of the domain names.
Bluesky promotes a “marketplace of algorithms” through its Custom Feeds feature, where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee stated that “In future updates [Bluesky] will make it easy for users to create custom feeds in-app.” Third-party tools to publish Custom Feeds on Bluesky have been created by independent developers, including a popular client named Skyfeed.
Bluesky Social claims that an aim “not be controlled by a single company” is furthered by a composable user experience, “stackable” moderation, and algorithmic choice. The platform offers a “marketplace of algorithms” where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds, user-managed moderation and labelling services, and user-made “starter packs” that allow users to quickly follow a large number of related accounts within a community or subculture.
Bluesky open-sourced its in-house moderation software called “Ozone” in March 2024 for these services. Bluesky introduced “anti-toxicity” features in August 2024, allowing users to “detach” quote posts from their original post and to hide replies to a user’s post. Bluesky also promised the addition of a community notes-like feature. Bluesky unveiled open source code in May 2022 for an early version of its distributed social network protocol, Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), since renamed the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.
The team opened its early code and placed it under an MIT License so that the development process would be seen in public. The AT Protocol’s initial architecture centers around three main services: a Personal Data Server (PDS), Relay (previously referred to as a Big Graph Service, or BGS), and an AppView. A PDS is a server which hosts user data in “Data Repositories”, which utilize a Merkle tree.
The PDS also handles user authentication and manages the signing keys for its hosted repositories. A Relay is described as analogous to an indexer on the web, ingesting repositories from a variety of different PDS hosts and serving them in a single unified stream for other services to ingest. AppViews, meanwhile, are services which consume data from a Relay and can serve it to final users.
As of November 2024, all systems are centralised or rely on a central authority run by BlueSky Social, including a central registry of identities and documents used to make them addressable: “The way that did:plc works is that Bluesky hosts a web service from which one can register, retrieve, and rotate keys (and other associated DID document information)”. Direct messages are offered though a parallel services outside the AT protocol, centrally run by BlueSky Social
According to Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and of an early internal proposal for an architecture eventually not adopted by BlueSky Social, «Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. However, “credible exit” is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for».
Mastodon can be bridged to Bluesky. Bluesky Social, officially named Bluesky Social PBC, is a privately-owned for-profit corporation. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends.
It is owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky Social employees. Graber has the largest ownership share of the company. In late 2024, members of the board of directors included Graber, Jeremie Miller, Mike Masnick, and Kinjal Shah. Funding for operations, as of late 2024, comes primarily from investors and venture capital firms. No advertising is available on the service as of November 2024, and Jay Graber has stated that Bluesky will not “enshittify the network with ads”.
The company is considering introducing an optional subscription service for users, as well as introducing user-to-user payment services. Reviewing the app in February 2023, TechCrunch called it “a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience”. Lance Ulanoff of TechRadar originally signed up in April 2023 and at the time declared Bluesky “quiet, reserved, thoughtful, or even polite. Overall, BlueSky is the equivalent of a social media Shangri-La.”
When he revisited it in November 2024 after the post-US election surge in signups he declared that “for the moment, it’s the most exciting place on social media” and “I wasted my day on Bluesky Social and no, I’m not sorry”. Jason Perlow of ZDNet straplines his article “It’s not a direct replacement for Twitter (X), but Bluesky has a lot to offer those who want a fresh start in a decentralized, privacy-minded network.”
He highlights the claimed decentralized nature of Bluesky, the lack of algorithmic feeds and in a lukewarm manner says that “Bluesky might be worth your time if you’re ready to leave algorithm-driven feeds behind and try a network that prioritizes user control.”Jay Peters of The Verge is much more upbeat in his review from April 2023, declaring upfront “Bluesky is really, really fun” and “I’m just really enjoying the vibes in my Bluesky feed.”
Leave a Reply