Posted by minimaxir 3 hours ago
https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...
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.)
One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.
Good luck!
could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...
"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.
And to me, that sounds like a much more concrete example of someone being a bully.
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)
How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service?
> 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.
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.
He pulled a quote from a publically available affidavit.
There was no identifying information whatsoever either.
What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.
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 to make hard product decisions about which user bases to serve.
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").
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.
Comparing ActivityPub with atproto is like pitting Email against Web. These are just differently shaped problems.
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.
Some orgs will go through three, from founder, to growth, to sustaining.
I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
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.
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.
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"
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)
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.
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.
Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
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.
These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
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 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.
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.
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.
Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.
Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...
Job opening to build sports relationships.
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.
It is not a place that is trying to showcase diverse opinions in an unbiased way.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?
Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification
It’s sort of like that.
