[HN Gopher] Twitter Bluesky: A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol
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       Twitter Bluesky: A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol
        
       Author : wmf
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2022-04-06 21:23 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blueskyweb.xyz)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blueskyweb.xyz)
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | Interested, but it seems a bit light on impl details. Presumably
       | too early?
        
       | wolverine876 wrote:
       | For those unaware, it is/was a project of Twitter's Jack Dorsey.
       | You can find many news stories covering it from when it was
       | announced. Here's one:
       | 
       | https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-anno...
        
       | yosito wrote:
       | This rambling post from a web company I've never heard of touches
       | on some interesting theories and attractive buzzwords, but it's
       | overall main point is about as indecipherable as if the post had
       | been autogenerated by GPT3 using the headline as the prompt. My
       | unanswered questions are: who is Bluesky? What is their
       | relationship with Twitter? Are they developing a tangible
       | protocol that has concrete specifications, a roadmap, and path to
       | adoption? Or is this just a rambling blog post about some ideas
       | that could be applied to a social protocol?
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | iamstupidsimple wrote:
         | I believe it's part of (or at least funded by) Twitter:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
        
         | wolverine876 wrote:
         | It is/was a project of Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO
         | 
         | https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-anno...
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | whyrusleeping wrote:
         | Hello Fellow Internet User, In general, it is your own
         | responsibility to keep yourself informed when commenting on
         | something. The World Wide Web makes this easy with something
         | called a 'hyperlink', for example, the one at the top of the
         | article you read that says 'blog': https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog
        
           | yosito wrote:
           | The responsibility to communicate well does not fall on the
           | reader. This blog post did not communicate well.
        
           | wolverine876 wrote:
           | The parent comment, not the GP, is against HN guidelines.
           | Just downvote the GP and demonstrate appropriate
           | communication.
        
       | d4mi3n wrote:
       | I don't know anything about bluesky, but I applaud any initiative
       | that could provide a path away from the highly centralized web we
       | find ourselves in today.
       | 
       | Also excited to see verifiable computation as an underpinning of
       | this particular initiative. It's a fun topic and technology I
       | haven't seen too broadly explored.
        
       | steve76 wrote:
        
       | rglullis wrote:
       | Forgive my cynicism, but it's been two years already since
       | bluesky was announced and all we see is the occasional update
       | from what seems a research project. Nothing really tangible is
       | released, no extension proposal to the existing protocols is
       | made, not one single proof-of-concept that shows "look, protocol
       | X can not do Y, so we implemented Z".
       | 
       | Every update from them feels more and more like an elaborate PR
       | piece. Just some hot air to keep the illusion that Jack really
       | cares about decentralization.
        
       | mawise wrote:
       | The linked ecosystem overview[1] is a great exploration of the
       | space. However, there's no mention of IndieAuth[2] in the
       | exploration of decentralized and self-sovereign identity. I'd
       | love to better understand why it's been left out because it seems
       | really appealing in my own explorations of the space.
       | 
       | [1] https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-
       | ecosyste...
       | 
       | [2] https://indieauth.net/
        
         | jalcine wrote:
         | Strong agree. It would even allow for more seamless
         | transitioning between silos and sovereign identities.
        
       | muglug wrote:
       | There's no mention here of moderation, a key ingredient to any
       | social network of people who lack real-world ties to each other.
        
         | pfraze wrote:
         | It is, and we're talking with people who do trust & safety at
         | Twitter to make sure we're approaching it right. To be clear,
         | we're really in the early stages of the project. This post is
         | just the stuff we have a clear concept about, and even that's
         | just an early prototype (which we'll put on github soon). I
         | could talk about some of the approaches we're looking at for
         | moderation but it's just really early, and I don't want to talk
         | out the wrong end. All I can say is, we talk about it a lot.
        
           | ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
           | Could you also talk to the web team about re-adding the
           | vertical scrollbar? It's an important UI element.
        
           | jfengel wrote:
           | I really appreciate that you're at least thinking about it.
           | Community is a bit like security: you can't just layer it on
           | after building the "cool parts" of your system. The name
           | "trust & safety" makes the parallel even more clear.
           | 
           | It's harder to set rigorous definitions for community than it
           | is for security. So it will likely change as the project
           | evolves. But if you ignore it entirely, and just hope it will
           | work itself out, you'll be in a continuous state of crisis-
           | fighting.
        
         | wolverine876 wrote:
         | I'd go further and say that our toxic social media environments
         | are a far more damaging, dangerous, and unsolved problem -
         | possibly more than litterly any problem in the world, IMHO -
         | than decentralized communication, and this project addresses
         | the latter.
         | 
         | And I strongly believe in decentralized social media, far
         | prefer Usenet (RIP) to Twitter, and have from the start. But
         | it's a solvable problem (Signal is working toward it, Matrix,
         | existing solutions like Mastadon, etc.), they just need to
         | attract development investment and, most of all, the hardest
         | part, attract users.
         | 
         | And Twitter seems to have bought into the toxicity, bringing in
         | one of the few leading popularizers and uses of that subculture
         | - trolling, mis- and disinformation, manipulation, corruption
         | of power, etc. - onto their board. And rather than
         | decentralizing power in our society, they've concentrated more
         | of it in the richest person in the world, who already adds to
         | that a cult of personality, and now has significant influence
         | over one of the largest public communication forums.
        
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