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Posted by kevinak 5 hours ago

Be wary of Bluesky(kevinak.se)
98 points | 68 commentspage 2
8cvor6j844qw_d6 3 hours ago|
Bluesky's behavior here isn't surprising.

They already ban signups using email aliases, and apparently block alias emails to their unban support address too.

why_only_15 4 hours ago||
Pangram labs thinks this post is fully AI generated, for what it's worth. https://www.pangram.com/history/47460dd9-f9cc-45a8-81dd-dc59...
kevinak 4 hours ago||
It is not, but I have used Claude to edit it.
tptacek 4 hours ago||
Claude is an excellent proofreader, but don't let a single word it generates hit your final copy. Use it to catch things and point things out, and for nothing more.
kevinak 4 hours ago|||
I’ll keep that in mind, thanks!
650REDHAIR 4 hours ago|||
Why?
tptacek 4 hours ago|||
It's good at spotting stuff, like:

* Overusing verbs

* Poor structure

* Bad transitions between grafs

* Passive voice

And even bigger-picture stuff, like "you might want to zoom in here" or "this section isn't paying off". I've only in the past few months started using it for proofreading, and it's pretty solid.

But if you take any of its words, you're infecting your writing with Claude's tone, and it will show.

It's super useful as a reader of your writing. It's a terrible collaborator, unless you're writing for an audience of middle managers.

cyberge99 3 hours ago||
I’ve always had a sophisticated vocabulary, now people think my content is AI generated. Frown.
antonvs 2 hours ago||
Vocabulary is only part of it. LLM style is pretty recognizable, and most people don’t normally write like that. One reason is because they’re trained in a lot of marketing material, news articles, and the like. If it sounds like a self-unaware middle manager writing on LinkedIn, but it isn’t one, it’s probably an LLM.
denuoweb 4 hours ago|||
The guy you are responding to has "All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 Thomas H. Ptacek, All Rights Reserved." in his HN profile....
cyberge99 3 hours ago||
Sounds like a hedge against Agentic bots.
runako 3 hours ago|||
This app flags "'s infrastructure" as a hallmark of AI-generated prose. Other markers of AI generation include "'s not just", "making it", "'t just" (33x more likely in AI!), and "ecosystem".

I don't think it's trustworthy.

nilkn 4 hours ago|||
Pangram itself looks like it was just generated by Google AI Studio.
sbinnee 4 hours ago|||
Pangram seems like a useful service for the world we are going to face. To me the semicolon-newline pair reminds of AI almost immediately. I am surprised that this service didn’t point that out. It could be just to me this pattern is bothering though.

> His answer:

A_D_E_P_T 3 hours ago||
"Where X actually lives" is a new hallmark of AI writing. I've noticed it a lot lately.
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago||
"That's the same argument people made about Twitter. 'If it goes bad, we'll just leave.' We know how that played out."

Yeah, I left.

(And in fact I am wary of all social media.)

eviks 45 minutes ago|
So it played very poorly, you lost personal data and most importantly, social connections, and acquired a weariness
mcint 5 hours ago||
It's good FUD. You re-iterate their talking points. (Also, no CTA, no takeaway, just "worry!")

As others have said, the data has to be publishable to be useful. We do have data export laws. The format is known to be ready to use interoperably, not some private schema--atop the PBC commitment, which will at least have moderate legal costs if not a guarantee. It has unequivocally set a new high bar.

They seem pretty locked in to doing what they committed to. The day may come when they turn. It may come first by friction, but the turn has to be pretty complete, because the data is pretty open. What's needed to view it, use it at all, is pretty close to what's needed to host it.

"The site whose value prop is sharing your posts and data with other apps may stop sharing your posts and data with other apps." Yeah, it's possible. It's also possible they just close.

themafia 2 hours ago||
I've never looked at the AT Protocol before. It seems like you could have achieved most of that with existing DNS, HTTP and RSS implementations. All they really needed was some file formats and some well known URL schems and all of this could have been far easier to implement and deploy.
ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago||
For more atproto, see their recently redesigned homepage https://atproto.com/blog/new-site-2026
qwertox 4 hours ago||
> If an acquirer disables exports, it doesn't matter that the tools existed yesterday.

Don't they have to give you your data upon request? And the cheapest way is to offer an export function? Wasn't this thanks to the EU (GDPR Article 20)?

asadotzler 2 hours ago||
They can give it to you in the least useful way imaginable and will. What we want and expect is an export that can be easily imported to some other provider and that's where the "good guys" can differentiate.

I can export decades of web browsing history, bookmarks, logins, etc. and import into any other browser with almost no trouble at all. Try to export your mainstream social network (facebook, twitter, insta, tiktok, etc.) content and connections and import it into another social network and let me know how that goes.

Spivak 4 hours ago||
Also, at best this says not to host your data on someone else's computer and keep control of it, which is a thing Bluesky explicitly supports and encourages.

Will normal people do it, no. But you can.

publius_frog 4 hours ago||
(Throwaway account.)

Several people have mentioned that "you can just own your own data, so that's enough, right?"

Interoperating with Bluesky requires you to either 1) opt into the did:plc standard, which is a centrally controlled certificate transparency log, or 2) have all your users create did:web accounts by manually setting DNS records.

So it is not possible to build on Bluesky at all without opting into this centrally controlled layer. This original post covers this, but maybe not in enough detail to stop commenters from missing the point.

Bluesky the company controls 95%+ of PDSes in the system, which control users' private keys, and they're extending PDSes to include more functionality that prevents users from easily exiting the network, e.g. private data is being implemented in a way where Bluesky LLC can see all your activity. The protocol changes often and with limited community input.

This is being done because "there are no other ways to do it" and "our users are okay with it". The community does pretty consistently attack people who dissent (e.g. look at what happened when Mastodon leaders objected). There's a lot of cheerleading for people who do opt into the system, and there's really no incentive for informed criticisms.

It's not really decentralized or neutral infrastructure; it's a great network for a number of specific subcultures who have a nice space away from X, and I hope the team embraces that.

davidw 5 hours ago||
Good points, but what's the alternative at this point?

Because of network effects, more users is generally more interesting. Blue Sky has "enough" at this point for me to be happy there. Programmers like antirez, my bike racing people like inrng, my city's mayor and one of our city councilors, and also a bunch of urbanists.

Edit: you lose some connections moving around, but I've also had friends I've known since the days of IRC. I think I'm mostly resigned to picking whatever works best in the moment and being willing to move (like abandoning Twitter) when it's not working.

PaulHoule 5 hours ago||
https://indieweb.org/POSSE

which is not opposed to you being on Bluesky or Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever.

seandoe 5 hours ago||
That's just not practical for most people (the publishing part). And in relation to microblogging, are you going to publish every 140-character, out-of-context thought on your personal website?
8organicbits 4 hours ago||
There's other syndication models, although POSSE gets talked about most.

If you don't want to get your own domain and run a server (not practical for most people) you can still protect yourself from being stuck in a single silo by broadcasting to many social media sites.

https://indieweb.org/PESETAS

seandoe 4 hours ago||
And the atproto is pesetas right? You publish to bluesky or whatever and the content is replicated to your pds. I recognize the minor difference, but if you have the energy and wherewithal to orchestrate pesetas across silos, surely you can setup a pds elsewhere.
8organicbits 4 hours ago||
I think of PESETAS as more defensive than what a single protocol can handle. Imagine posting to Bluesky and using automation to syndicate the post to Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Threads, and more. If Bluesky goes evil, or you otherwise decide to ditch it, you've mitigated the network effect as you have followers on other platforms already. People can still find you and your content isn't lost.

Imagine if Bluesky decides to ban you, and continues to ban accounts you create elsewhere. Atproto ensures non-Bluesky PDS can see you, but you've lost 99% of the userbase.

kevinak 5 hours ago|||
Nostr - it has none of the problems mentioned in the article.
davidw 5 hours ago||
But does it have a critical mass of people?

The Wikipedia page says "Nostr is primarily popular with cryptocurrency users, primarily Bitcoin users."

That's not my crowd.

irusensei 4 hours ago||
I hear you but if you think about it who else has an incentive and skills to create something like Nostr? Who are the people interested in free speech, signatures and decentralization and with the skills to pull it up?

And since you mentioned primarily Bitcoin users those are the crypto folks that seem to be very against the idea of tokenizing everything.

From what I understand by posting something on Nostr you are posting signed events to a list of dumb relays. These events can be of many types and include hints of discoverability. There is no blockchain and no token and the thing they call zap is just a link to a lightning address that is up to the client to show.

Your account is your key pair so you are not at the whims of a power tripping administrator.

It seems like the perfect nesting ground for non corporate user content and pocket islands of communities. Nothing prevents someone from implementing a relay or community that bans any talk about Bitcoin or crypto. I for one would love to see closed content focused relays in Nostr.

manuelabeledo 4 hours ago|||
Isn't Mastodon an alternative?
davidw 4 hours ago||
Not in terms of having a critical mass of users for many topics or being very accessible for a lot of people.
loeg 4 hours ago||
If you're concerned about critical mass, Bluesky is also a dead end.
davidw 3 hours ago||
I mean, I explained in my original comment exactly why it is not a dead end for me. It has 'enough' of the things I'm interested in to make it worthwhile.
moomoo11 4 hours ago||
Go outside
jongjong 4 hours ago|
If anything gets too popular too quickly, I just assume it's a PsyOp. That kind of growth requires extensive media coordination and big money. If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product. As sure as gravity.
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