That’s to be expected. What remains to be seen is how many of them will stick around after the initial surge.
Im more curious how many are bots made to look like its booming with traffic
idk. After they dropped invite codes, they started requiring phone numbers for sign up.
Because those aren’t incredibly easy to spoof or anything?
Exactly, they aren’t.
I registered with a VoIP number that a free app gave me. I doubt they’re blocking all the freely available “temp sms” numbers out there.
You can spoof caller ID but you can’t spoof a number to receive texts to it. Can you imagine?
Oh actually it’s worse than that. There are online companies that offer online SMS services that can receive messages from real phone numbers by essentially telling your carrier you want text messages forwarded to them. Obviously they usually make you prove that you own the number before requesting forwarding, but there’s ways around that. I’ve known several people who’ve had their online accounts broken in to because someone hijacked their phone number’s SMS in order to perform password resets or bypass 2FA.
Losers are also scamming Craigslist posters. “Oh good I’ll be available at that time! BTW, I’ve been dealing with a lot of bots on here. Can you send me the code you’re receiving right now?”
(then you get a code from WhatsApp or something)
Bro what??
Telco needs to be replaced
I’m one of those people, definitely not a bot. A friend with several invitations to the beta available offered me one a few days ago and then it was opened so I didn’t need it
I hope you dont think I was saying it was ONLY bots. Ofc there are humans on there.
Im jc how many are bots.
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oh nice. If this trend continues, they will be by 4 million tommorrow and 20 million next week and by summer every human on earth will have an account.
You’re now a moderator of c/capitalism & c/investing
Ahaha
Cool I’ve discovered my newest fetish.
And then onward to the extraterrestrial market!
Disco Stu would be proud.
Yeah, no thanks. I’m good with Lemmy and Mastodon.
Same - I was mildly curious to be honest, but not nearly enough to give them my phone number.
I had never even heard of bluesky before and also not really interested. Looks like another Twitter replacement, but I never really got into twitter to start with.
I saw the title and I was like “1987 blue sky studios is open to the public? The hell does that mean?”
Bluesky is supposed to be Twitter 2.0 - Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, is on the board for Bluesky and was supposedly very involved in building the platform. So in theory it could be a lot of things that Twitter wished it could, or it could just be bad like most other socials.
Either way if you have an interest in the tech world it’s probably worth keeping an eye on.
Is it weird that I’m enamored by technological improvements but mostly disgusted by the “tech world” ?
Nah I don’t think so.
Goodbye Bluesky
Removed by mod
It’s in sort of a weird intermediate space - it does have a federated protocol, but currently the main bluesky server is the only thing on it.
Yeah so effectively not federated. Pretty sure they’re not actually interested in federating anyway
It’s supposed to happen relatively soon I think https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation
As I understand it thats just federation within their own protocol, however I have seen on Mastodon a group of devs working on bridging the protocols. My canary in the coal mine for Bluesky is how the treat that dev team and so far it seems they’re just letting them do their thing.
That project is called Bridgy Fed.
Oh that’s wonderful that the idea is getting recognition like that.
They started moving people to the Federated server last year to test things. I didn’t see this article but people were openly talking about moving over on Bluesky. So thanks for posting this because I always see people say it’s not getting Federated on Lemmy, but see people on Bluesky say it is, confusing.
It seems like the people running it are pretty ideologically committed to the federation concept, I’d be surprised if it was never implemented. They seem to hope it will resolve some of the moderation problems that plagued twitter.
Do you want a mainstream corporate app to be federated?
To some extent I feel like the inverse of this would be “do you wish Gmail wasn’t federated?”
Can you explain?
A lot of Lemmy users don’t want twitter or anything meant to take twitters place run by corps to be federated because the whole point of any platform of that kind is to make money off ad revenue. That’s why people on Lemmy seem to be trying to FOSS all the things.
Something like 80% of email goes through Google and Apple. But, email is just about the most successful federated protocol we have. Also, I believe that these services would have become huge regardless, and I’m glad that they are dominant while using an open protocol instead of something they can exert much more control over.
In an ideal world, I believe the goal for federated social media is that you don’t care what platform other users you interact with are on, and they can freely move to other platforms without compromise. It’s scary if a big corpo controls too much marketshare and can break compatibility with other apps. But, if the protocol is truly open, there can’t be any barrier to corpos launching services on the protocol either.
I tend to agree when everyone is worried about an already existing major player joining federation (e.g. FB with threads). But bluesky is a new entrant to the space; they will have to fight the existing giants for market anyway. And if they’re starting small, then them being federated means that as soon as they start to get credible traction, any other company would be able to launch their own app in the same space. If the scare of big players is that they’ll choose to one day stop playing nicely with federation, then it will definitely be easier for them to say “you can no longer chat with a few random FOSS weirdos” than to say “you can no longer chat with this other major app”.
tl;dr, for me the goal isn’t to have a protocol that can only talk to other people who care about FOSS; it’s to have a way to talk to everyone. Eventually, that means that I hope we do hit a critical mass of “big players” buying in, even if they’re motivated by profit.
Okay, but the fact the email is that way makes it very vulnerable to a lot of other problems especially with security, and a lot of it is driven either by sales or by an attempt to keep workflows moving and people productive which only adds to the number of tasks to be completed.
I know that’s getting a little far afield, but I wouldn’t say that email is a good example specifically because it isn’t what I would consider successful because it kind of does the opposite of what it was meant to do. Nobody really likes email. I wouldn’t say that most of us want to use it. And the things it should be useful for? Sending and receiving information for really important and time sensitive things like test results from a doctor, or financial documents? None of that is actually emailable. We’re still relying on fax for those things.
So it being federated does what to benefit the average user? Because that’s what I mean. People want federation to benefit the people who use it. I have a work email I barely check. It mostly exists to tell me I have online training to complete and to receive authentication codes, which I would argue isn’t the best use case. My personal email is mostly for receipts. I don’t send many emails at all, and honestly a lot of the ones I receive are to sell me something. I’m not using email to interact with people so much as I am with systems.
I agree in general, but 20 years ago, people were using email to actually talk to each other. There are problems with the protocol, but those aren’t related to the way it is federated imo. The reason people stopped using email to talk to each other was because the features of newer options were better – things like IMs and Skype, which have continued to evolve into stuff like WhatsApp or whatever people use now. But, unlike email that was devised in an era when things were still being driven largely by the education sector etc, all these other solutions were made by post-dotcom era profit-driven companies.
So I agree that email has lots of problems, and some of those are certainly related to its federation (e.g., the protocol has not really been able to advance in significant ways since making changes to it is nearly impossible). But I still think it’s the best example of a federated messaging protocol we have today.
Anyway that’s all a bit afield, as you said. I think the bottom line for me is that whichever protocol it is, if one of these current attempts at federation is going to meet my goals, then eventually there should be a large number of commercial entities participating. I know that’s not everyone’s goal though, but there’s a reason I don’t use IRC for example.
Yes, they have the most users and the most cultural significance.
Having the most users is great until you realize that’s how Twitter became… Well. Twitter. Before Musk it was still a shit show, with a whole lot of alt right BS going on. It’s gotten worse since he bought it but this is the late stage for platforms like this.
What
As in, part of the enshittification process that brought a lot of us to places like mastodon and Lemmy had to do with social media relying on being wide spread and giving a lot of people (who probably shouldn’t have a platform that reaches the masses) a platform that then proliferates things like conspiracy theories and hate. Additionally though, they survive off ad revenue and have investors which generally makes them sooner or later hostile towards the users so that the investors can benefit from a profitable platform.
I see your point. However I think enshitification is more due to the latter issue than the former. People in general are good at shutting down hate speech if given the tools.
whoever made that graph needs to learn how to properly space their horizontal axis labels
How quickly will it become a serious contender against Twitter?
I’ll stick with lemmy, but I’d love to bathe in some schadenfreude at musks expense.
Someone is already sitting on the rocketlab name. I’m only on X for space launch tweets, and was hoping some of them were posting on both X and Bsky
Engagement :
“Hello world!”
“Hi”
“Welcome”
“Hi”That’s the beauty of it already being a thriving forum before opening up to the public, there’s a lot of ongoing content beyond people logging on and saying hi for the first time.
While some may see this as good for Bluesky, I bet this is the floodgates opening to bots and algorithmically boosted harmful content. Good luck everyone on there!
Threads default settings are like an open fire hose of rage bait and negativity spraying directly into your face. It’s pretty wild without some manual feed pruning.
I’ve been using Mastodon and it’s a pleasant change of pace. I’ve heard of some spam happening there but I think responsive admins and the lack of algorithmic feeds really reduces their reach.
Mastodon’s the best social media I’ve used. I’ve curated such a quality feed.
All the algorithms on bluesky are optional, there’s both official feeds and a lot of 3rd party feeds (and they don’t run on view counts!), so there’s no trivial way to game the algorithms to reach the userbase
Fair, though this is also where the double-edge sword of discoverability steps in too. Many people complain about the lack of it on decentralized systems, but centralized systems have a nice catalog of users for bots to message with little effort.
I’ll admit that lack of discoverability isn’t a perfect solution since there are other ways for spammers to discover users. E-mail is a great example of a large, long running, decentralized system that has increasingly suffered from spam since its inception due to mass data collection of addresses. However if you’re really careful about who you share your address with, it’s possible to still avoid most of it. I give out unique e-mail address to companies and spam tends to only come in on a few, often because they were breached or are otherwise “leaky” about their user’s data. Dropbox is by far the worst offender.
That’s what I was thinking… Here come the bots
You need to register with a phone number, and they send a verification SMS to the number which you must complete to finish registration
I think that’s difficult for bulk bots
Nah it just means you need to contract with a temp sms number provider. It’ll be difficult for your average kid in a garage to run bulk bots but not for state, corporate, and other well funded actors.
I’ve seen pictures of rooms with walls full of Android cell phones on shelves all hooked up by USB for power and remote control. They can load apps, register accounts, and interact with content inside the app while appearing as legitimate mobile users. That’s why moves like Reddit restricting API access only hurt legitimate users and lazy bot farms, cause the hardcore bot farms have been using the official app on real phones all along.
What is it?
What is bluesky? Basically a twitter clone that was spun off as it’s own thing by the twitter team that was working on federation when Musk took over. It’s pretty good if you liked the pre-Musk twitter vibe or a slightly smaller scale and leftier version of it.
The name “Blue sky” very creative and smart
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Meaning Jack Dorsey? He had some involvement in starting bluesky but is more pushing his own “nostr” site, and has had a hilarious arc of being ever more hostile to bluesky and its left-leaning userbase.
Lol so petty
That’s not how that worked
Ah yes another commercial social media platform taking the first steps in the enshitification process. We’ve seen this all before in the early days of other platforms before the decay sets in.
They have more posts than lemmy has active users. Nice
It could still grow even more as they haven’t opened registration to all countries yet.
Is that so? I haven’t heard anything about registrations only be open in certain countries.
The signup form requires sms verification, but they can’t send the sms to all countries yet.
Ah bummer, that is annoying.
people are wondering if bluesky will end up like twitter. I’m not for one reason, twitter didn’t start going to shit until elon took over, fired the content mod team, and let the neo nazis, porn bots, and cryptobros run rampant. twitter before elon was fairly functional and useful.
when they eventually scale up I can see bluesky being what pre elon twitter was, especially with content moderation.
As if they didn’t learned their lessor with Twitter.
I’m curious what lesson learned from twitter easily also applies to bluesky, as that’s genuinely not very clear to me.
That going into corporate, VC funded, centralization focused and privately controlled social network is not good long-term idea.
Myself I have nothing against profit itself, but the relationship of how single entity can manage network.
But they’re (allegedly soon) federated and say they want to give control of the protocol over to an independent standards body. So like, half of the stuff you’re saying might not even really apply here.
It’s the mindset. Standard bodies already have plenty of protocols established, with ActivityPub being the latest trend implemented in dozens of different federated apps. XMPP for real time data flow or (not yet standardized) Matrix for shared graph databases. Bluesky is another XKCD 927.
I won’t expect anything great from a social service from the start hosted on Amazon AWS, with domain bought from Google Domains, developed on Microsoft GitHub, announcing app first on Apple AppStore and not supporting basic decentralization-friendly things like IPv6.
Does this mean Mastodon users will be able to interact with Bluesky users?
Not inherently. But since both Mastodon and Bluesky use some sort of public protocol, it is possible that people will develop some bridging software that allows both protocols to talk to each other. I think some people are already trying to build something like that, but I have no idea how well it will work/what the trade-offs will be. Maybe not every feature can be easily translated between the protocols.
