Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.

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 solutions to differently shaped problems.

ActivityPub is fine if you enjoy your identity being held hostage by whatever random server admin decides to keep the lights on. Want to move servers? Hope you're cool with losing your followers. Want real account portability? Too bad. Want scalable search and flexible moderation? Also too bad.

ATproto wasn't built to compete with Mastodon out of pettiness, it was built because ActivityPub fundamentally cannot accomplish the task that ATProto/Bluesky is aiming for: a decentralized social network that isn't a cumbersome pain in the ass to use.

The tricky part with Bluesky is figuring out which phase they're even in. 40M signups sounds like growth phase, but the retention numbers tell a different story. They might need a sustaining CEO before they've actually finished growing, which is an awkward spot to be in.

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.

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)

From a content perspective nothing important is permitted to be discussed there. It's just another hivemind with the exact same opinions as reddit and HN. Completely pointless and nothing more than the output of a temper tantrum over not getting to be the censors in charge and the whole world knows it.

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.

Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?

These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.

ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about?

In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site, https://tangled.org, https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem.

If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you:

- https://overreacted.io/open-social/

- https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

The internet is forever, don't want it propagated? Don't post it.

> Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it.

Probably because they cannot truly guarantee or enforce it.

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.

Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."

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...

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.

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...

https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a

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.

The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.

We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.

This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.

That said, I have genuinely been enjoying Blue Sky. It has 'enough' for me. There are a bunch of YIMBYs and urbanists. The mayor of my city and one of my city councilors are there. There is starting to be a bike racing community. There are some good local journalists.

I read your other comment; I hope your optimism is warranted.

God damn what a miserable place you fuckheads turned tech into!

In case it's not clear YOU FAILED you hard-headed idiot. No amount of brown-nosing is going to save your ass you overly-political fucking loser.

13 of them are reposts, and 2 of them are his own actual posts and then made 2 more posts about becoming the interim CEO of Bluesky and then "thanking" Jay.

That doesn't seem like he even uses it regularly only up until the leadership changes.