Unnecessary, pointless, expensive features are precisely how you define the inverse of the original Twitter vision.
Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)
Identity management is the biggest issue with social media. I'm on mastodon, but my "identity" is tied directly to the server instance that I'm on. If something happens to that server instance then I'm basically losing my "identity". If my "identity" was tied to a domain I owned then keeping it would be as simple as changing a few DNS settings. I don't know enough about Bluesky to say if it's actually going to be an interesting decentralized platform, or if it's another social media run by a tech billionaire, but having domain names be the basis for your "identity" seems like the biggest revolution in that space.
I think that we absolutely need more of this as this gives the users ownership over their identity. Right now, if the New York Times wants to get verified on social media they rely on the platform to do so. With this it would be their own choice.
DNS is good enough for companies, governments, schools, organizations, military etc. Not to mention that most other identities are tied to a DNS identity of some sort. Sure it’s not ideal as something completely trust less and distribute like PGP, but it’s been 33 years and no one can come up with a decent UX for that because it’s not really possible. $8 a year is a barrier to entry, especially if you consider people in economies where that’s significant. But that’s when you tie your identity to someone else like gmail.com or yahoo.com or bsky.social. When you can afford it, you get to manage your own. it’s good enough.
Yes, DNS is good enough for organizations (though I should note that governments don't rely on DNS registrars, they run their own). The crucial difference is that organizations can hire people to care about those things, or hire lawyers to ensure they can be recovered if accidentally lost. And in fact many of these organizations change domains in the longer run for various reasons. So even there, DNS is often only used as a solution to identity at one point in time, it's not meant as a permanent solution for the entire life of an organization.
For individuals, the cost of losing your domain is far too high if it means losing your identity on multiple services at the same time. And, if nothing else, people eventually die, so domains will be lost by their original owner and then re-used, breaking the notion of identity again in the longer run.
There can be two kinds of identities: your actual legal one and ones you should be okay with losing.
People keep devising more and more involved ways to maintain identities other than your legal one, but if you think about it you can still lose any of those ways (your domain name, your private key, etc.) and in the end no one should use them for anything serious.
Identity also needs to be hard to copy (which is the main reason e.g. you would not want to use your a hash of your DNA as an identity -- it would be hard to lose but easy to copy).
How hard is it to run a registrar? I’d assume there are decent open source components to manage it. It’s basically a key value store. Why couldn’t governments provide a stable domain name for each individual?
No it is not. It is the easiest way for a country to block as MiTM is not only possible, it is the expected way of how DNS operate. I think it is not very common in US (as of now) that the government censors using DNS, but it is very popular in countries like India.
And if you take 1000s of judges of different ideologies who could do it, I would rather put my trust in Google that they won't mistakenly ban my account.
The possibility of being MitM (or really anything else to do with connecting or blocking the site) has nothing to do with the point the parent comment was trying to make, which is that DNS names very much are used as identities by many companies and organizations.
Entire brands are built around domain names, and even when not, they’re extremely common in advertising for most brands. To the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars spent to acquire the right domain name.
Twitter handle could cost 10s of thousands of dollar and it is a part of brand value, lot of times even more so than domain name. How is it worse identity than DNS?
While there's some truth to this, it's more of an incidental problem with DNS than an intrinsic one. There's nothing preventing registrars from simplifying their UX to target average customers, including multi-year registrations and ample warning systems.
No, it's really a fundamental problem with DNS. Owning a DNS name is, by design, a temporary deal. Ultimately the domain name system is meant to help give a user-readable name to your IP, not to establish your identity for your entire life.
Conversely it is a good - or at least adequate - platform for businesses to build their identity on.
But I don't know if this is being imagined as "how businesses will communicate on our platform" or it is being treated as "regular users will totally manage their own DNS".
As someone who worked in e-commerce with high value brands, this is entirely true. If you even slightly infringe on a brand name, they will throw lawyers at you and the simple threat of bankruptcy will have you handing over the domain. I’ve seen it happen too many times to count.
Relevent concept: Zooko's Triangle [1]: it's hard to have a naming system which is decentralised and secure against spoofing without giving you long and random (or hashed) names, like with .onion services
devjab is saying how having identity based on domain names you own is better than identity based on server instances (or centralized social media providers like FB, Google etc). You haven't really refuted their point, which still stands in spite of risk of losing your domain if you don't pay in time.
Btw, do you have a better proposal to mitigate the risk of failure to renew domain registration in time?
The status right now is that you have one identity for each service you interact with. If that service decides to ban you or goes down or you get your identity stolen, you lose that identity, but keep your identity on all of the other services you use. In the worse case, if you didn't tell people about your other identities ahead of time, they may still search for you and find you somewhere else.
If several services recognized your identity by virtue of having the same domain name, the fallout from losing that identity is much worse: you lose access to all these services at once, and whoever gets the domain name next will gain access to all of your followers and have a pre-built history. And if one service decides to ban you, you'll be exactly where you were if your identity was specific to that service.
So, with DNS-based cross-service identities, you are at best in the same place as having service-specific identities, and at worse, much worse off.
Additionally, a service which bans your account will typically not give the same name to a new user, or, even if they do, they will still separate the two identities / cleanup all previous posts. A DNS registrar will absolutely give the same domain to someone else if you stop paying for it, and any services which recognize that as your identity may not even know that a change in ownership has taken place.
The only stable life-long identity system I know of are state-assigned identities (with the court system as a last line for complex cases).
Apart from that, I think per-service identities are the best that can be hoped for. If I choose to engage with Facebook, I have to trust them to some extent anyway, so trusting them with my identity on Facebook is probably good enough. If I want to establish that some Twitter identity is the same as some Instagram identity, I can do so by directly referencing them from one another. I don't think we can do much better than that without involving the state.
PKI can authenticate a message to a key, but can't resolve human name to a key unless it'll be highly centralized, well moderated and not cancellable. Maybe if a user just couldn't choose the ID at all, that could destroy the motive to spoof an ID, and solve the problem?
Blockchain does not by itself solve identity. You can build identity solutions atop a blockchain, sure. But “built as a blockchain” does not at all hint towards your blueprint to solving this problem.
That's the same for other alternative distributed name systems like DHT based naming. For example, how should the DHT be bootstrapped, should there be any universal root zones, etc etc. GNS and IPNS are both DHT based naming systems which make different choices, much like there are various blockchain based naming systems out there.
Anyway my understanding is that Bluesky uses DIDs for exactly that reason, to punt the actual naming implementation and avoid silly internet fights like this.
You can’t ignore the cryptocurrency layer, it’s required to fund the miners/validators who secure and run the chain. Blockchains don’t work without the cryptocurrency.
And there’s already at least one blockchain purpose-built for naming - https://handshake.org/. Worth reading their design notes on how and why it works as it does.
Isn’t that why they are partnering with Namecheap, to make the process simple?
I do agree with you, I just don’t think it’s really an issue unless having a domain is the only way to have an “identity” on the network. If it’s something you can opt into, then I don’t see how it’s a problem. It depends on the implementation of course.
It can be made simple, especially if it’s a DNS record that’s unique to a platform. For example, if you set up an MS365 account and are using Cloudflare for DNS, there’s an OAuth like flow where MS will auto-magically update your DNS.
Exactly. By partnering with Namecheap, there's a golden happy paved path that's just: buy domain, press "work with Bluesky" button, and there is no step three. Most people can handle that and those that can't already have friends they rely on for that kind of stuff.
>If something happens to that server instance then I'm basically losing my "identity".
This is why Mastodon instances should be run by user-owned nonprofit cooperatives so that there's accountability on the day to day operations to the people who depend on it and there's policies around continuity of service. This doesn't have to be hard, and it already fits into existing legal frameworks.
Certainly _buying_ domain names to be your identity is new, but OpenID[1] was doing basically that 15 years ago.
Add a few meta tags to your website homepage, use that homepage as your "identity" to log in to websites, and they'd up your configured identity provider to do the login & request name/email/whatever else. You weren't locked in to a particular provider, since you logged in as _your_ webpage and could change the meta tags to point to a different provider.
Account migration still depends on the server you are moving from being online and not blocking the migration. It is only a partial solution to the problems that people look to identity migration to solve.
Mastodon could have done this (via SRV records), but chose instead to delegate to WebFinger (which does not support DNS-based redirection): https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1931 So if you want to own your Mastodon identity as a domain, you must also maintain a Webfinger server to act as a redirect.
For the record, no registries or TLD holders allow you to own the domain.
You are always leasing it, and if the registry decide to jack the price, remove your domain or give it to someone else they can (usually with some level of self-imposed rules). The ruls vary between gTLDs and ccTLDs, but believing you "own" a domain can be a dangerous assumption.
> Identity management is the biggest issue with social media.
I have to be honest, I can think of many far bigger issues with social media, namely, bullying, harassment, misinformation, and addiction, among others
Actually, bluesky has supported custom domains since the very beginning (the Namecheap deal is the part of this story that is actually new/noteworthy) and it is very widely-used. I am unsure what % of active users are using their own domain, but it is not insignificant.
The domain feature hasn't blocked dev on more important things. In fact this deal is (according to bluesky) their first attempt at something to generate some revenue, with the goal being to never have to use advertising, something that the users would in fact be grateful for and consider to be important.
Yeah, using your own domain name is an interesting solution to the nomadic identity problem. I still want to look at how Mike Macgirvin from Hubzilla/Zot is handling it, because he seems to be obsessed with solving this particular issue.
I was still naively thinking in terms of redirects from your old instance to your new one, but that's not going to help you if your old instance vanishes in thin air.
Engineers and designers and PMs are so smart and experienced and so eager to show each other how good at their job they are.
Thorough, complex, expansive feature sets are where those skillsets can shine; no glory in building something simple, to the point, and limited in scope.
Most products suck because people just cannot help themselves. It takes insane focus and control to override those tendencies when hundreds or thousands of people are working on a product (miss you Steve).
I wouldn't say it's unnecessary. Owning your identity is the worst problem in modern social networking. You have one identity. You. The idea you need to keep registering, providing emails, phones to everyone, picking usernames (often different) which can be impersonated, in order to create account which then can be banned at whim by private company moderators and so on... this is not the way.
I don't know if domains are the way either, but at least they're a name reservation system that's established and works. At the current price of a domain, it comes down to $1 a month, which is a great value if you can use it to identify yourself with, authenticate, authorize and own your own digital identity.
It can also be cheaper, because if this is a mass service for every person out there, scale will reduce some of the cost.
> The idea you need to keep registering, providing emails, phones to everyone, picking usernames ...
The great advantage of this workflow is that it minimises damage in event of service shutdown or malicious actors.
By maintaining discrete identities for each service you are compartmentalising and building resilience. It also provides a first layer of privacy, since it becomes more difficult for a malicious actor to correlate identities across services.
I must say, the number of people in here saying bluesky is dead because of Threads' overnight growth is surprising and upsetting. Believing all that matters is how fast they get users is hugely missing the point. Bluesky has been taking their time in order to get things right--and getting certain things right is very important. Twitter already exists; we need alternatives because things were handled wrong.
For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users. This takes time and it is also wise to complete moderation systems before opening the app up to everyone. Ineffective (or nonexistent?!) moderation systems are one of the biggest issues people have with many/most platforms including Twitter, and it is more important that they get it right than they get a zillion users overnight.
Crowning whichever one can "move faster and break things" as the winner is the wrong approach, and demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the problems plaguing Twitter and other platforms.
Honestly, Threads and Bluesky are barely comparable given how different they are philosophically and on a lot of very fundamental levels.
IMO social media websites lives or dies by network effect
if threads get hundred million people in a short period and they start to write and interact with each other then that a good moat for them.
Might be that BlueSky is not trying to be a popular social media platform. But if they want to then having right now their signup closed is a very bad decision.
It is already hard to keep track of where each discussion is: twitter, mastodon, instagram, facebook, linkedin ...
I think people are maybe trying one more from what they currently have.
look at Clubhouse - they tried the invitation idea and died with it in their hands. When having so many platforms available almost no one waits for yet another one for 3 months to get their handle to finally talk with 10%of their existing network as their other 90% still waits their invitation.
I did not say there should be only one. My assertion is that there are so many that the piece of the pie that remains for blue sky if the keep this invite only idea will diminish as time goes by.
Discord is not comparable to a forum at all. It’s a messaging app first and foremost. Anyone attempting to use it as a forum is shoving a square peg into a round hole with a screwdriver.
Forum channels are a bandaid solution for those people who refuse to use proper forums. It’s alright at what it does but it’s hardly the same. Far closer to ”Issues” on GitHub. In fact that’s mainly what I see it used for, issues and documentation that would benefit from its own indexable websites.
I disagree. It’s obviously wrong in the general case (e.g. look at note-taking or messaging apps), and there are all kinds of discussion forums with overlapping topics. Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon and Twitter all have overlapping use cases. Maybe my view is colored by not caring about “the market”. But there’s certainly space for more than one micro-blogging platform.
I disagree with you. Facebook, instagram, telegram, and discord are all very different. People use them in different contexts for different reasons.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, Youtube, Twitch all have specific niches in which they are dominant and cannot be unseated except through their own fault.
Messaging apps are a little more loose, I’ll give you that.
Clubhouse dropped off because they lost their secret sauce (exclusivity) the moment they opened invites up to nearly everyone.
It's still alive. But it's specifically them scaling up that killed their relevance because it turned out social audio was even better as a place for bullies and extremists than it is as an exclusive popular person hangout.
I personally think that it was Twitter Spaces that killed Clubhouse. Clubhouse was pretty novel when it came out, but it had the major downside that your network wasn't there like it was on Twitter and you needed an invite. It was the cool thing when it was the only game in town but once Twitter Spaces came out people realized that you could do the exact same thing over there without needing an invite and you had your entire network there.
It's the same thing that happened to Snapchat when IG Stories came out. Except in the case of Clubhouse it happened even quicker because their was no technical moat.
Sure but the new king of Twitter decided to open the gates and try to burn down his castle because the castle upkeep and providing for his retainers was too expensive.
Calling early winners is a longstanding pastime of tech...the Internet protocol stack was the dark horse candidate in telecom circles back in the 80's. Apple was "done for" in the mid-90's, in the same boat as Commodore, Atari and all the rest.
The reason to engage like this is basically a mindless chasing after of hierarchy: you want everyone to know who their overlord is now. This is very important to a certain kind of mind in a certain kind of position, because they will start engaging with that as if it were already true and make business decisions presuming the winner...and to be right, everyone else needs to go along with it. Otherwise they're the weird guy at the meeting, talking about the also-ran.
I have come to realise that sometimes you should just miss the forest for the trees. Because without the trees there will be no forest and. A social network is the forest.
> For example, Bluesky right now is ironing out a fairly novel moderation system. They are doing this not only transparently, but with the input and active involvement of the users.
So the old Slashdot moderation system, only with multiple layers?
Same with me, signed up for the waitlist months ago. Even asked around about buying an invite code but that just seemed a bit sketchy for me, it's so easy to get scammed doing that.
I'd love an invite eventually so I could try it out and really form an opinion on the whole Threads vs Bluesky vs Twitter drama, but I fear it's going to take much longer and I'll lose interest entirely. Which is a shame because I actually really like Twitter and have actively used it for 10+ years, but man Elon is making it really easy for me to jump ship somewhere.
Not the person you replied to, but I'd also be interested if you have any! I just sent you a message on Twitter to the link in your HN profile because I'm not sure how to private message here, I apologize if that's too forward!
I can’t wait to read the tell all book about Bluesky during this three day period when Threads hits a hundred million users and Bluesky makes the most important strategic decision of its existence.
> Not launching in the EU is a massive red flag on the data hoovering ambitions facebook have for threads
Not really. It just means they don’t want to wait for EU compliance to launch. It’s fairly standard to have an EU lag for feature releases, in the same way there is a lag for releasing certain content in Asia or financial products in the United States.
For obvious reasons, like the reasons the person you replied to mentioned: privacy violating features block apps like Threads from entering the EU market.
No it's just that often waiting for legal to validate you're ok to run in the EU isn't worth waiting around for. Better to launch in the USA and deal with the EU as needed.
Is it? I've heard people claim they got more value out of it than Mastodon already. Which would surprise me because Mastodon seems to be working extremely well. (I don't use it myself, but I follow a lot of people on Mastodon.)
I imagine “In practice” is referring to the fact that massive portion or potential users (including myself) can’t access the app because of the registration limits.
I'm not trying to be offensive in any way with this comment.
Why did you try Threads?
This question comes from a person who doesn't have a twitter account, so if the answer is that you want to replace your twitter usage with something else, could you elaborate the value you get out of these platforms?
I tried hard to get a bluesky invite a few months ago. Even put a few bids on ebay hoping to get one for less then $100. The fomo has since passed. Probably wouldn't bother signing up if I got one today.
Loads of names seem bad until they stop being words and turn into meaningless tokens. "iPad" received a ton of criticism, and now basically nobody cares.
But even with that said, I thought "Bluesky" seemed perfectly fine as a name. It's perhaps tying itself a bit to being an "escape" or "clean start" (implicitly "from twitter", now that many people are dissatisfied with Elon's leadership), but nobody is going to forget that aspect of the social media landscape for a while, so I don't think it's a problem.
Threads looks like absolute genius as a brand name next to "Bluesky" although Bluesky also looks genius next to "Mastodon", like how many people picked randomly on the street could even spell that one.
How is it bad? I hate Facebook as much as the next folk, but Threads is pretty good because it's the most possible generic name you could give a Twitter clone. The term has been in use since the 90s to refer to the format of basically every textual exchange, and IMO it works exactly because it's so shallow.
Also props to the logo designer, I really like the fact that it's a thread.
wait really? i thought "Threads" was pretty genius. it's a social network where people post threads. people already know and use the word "threads". you post tiktoks on tiktok, reels on reels, and threads on threads.
It's entirely happenstance, but I like the accidental reference to BBC Threads (the nuclear war TV film). Not only is it a "post apocalypse" evacuation site to many people, but the opening narration of the film muses on how society depends on the "threads" between us and others. Essentially describing the network effect that social media platforms live and die by
Threads is a fantastic name, in my opinion. It is self-descriptive, it trademarks an English word, like Windows, everybody knows how to spell it, and works in multiple languages. What's not to like?
At least they were reasonably portable words that worked in most Latin-based languages.
Whereas Bluesky is firmly English, and probably tilting more towards American corporate English in terms of "Blue sky thinking". Substitute CielBleu as a thought experiment.
This is the type of feature / partnership you build in year 5, not pre-launch.
Wouldn't it be better to focus on features and scalability needed for opening up the network to more users to build the network beyond a beta phase or adding core features to the app?
Seems like identity management is at the core of what Bluesky is trying to change. Twitter managing verification of accounts makes it harder to not be seen as an endorsement of some degree. With this system, Bluesky doesn’t need to verify @iphone, when Apple can just create @iphone.apple.com. It’s pretty central to their identity management and verification. Having it in year 5 is like not having it at all.
What you say is true, but the Namecheap partnership is premature even taking that into account.
Why? The high sensitivity domains that are most likely to want to be verified via the (mildly confusing) domain-to-user mapping on Bluesky already exist. To take your example, Apple is not likely to try and register iphone.apple.com on Namecheap.
On the other hand, "normal" users who just want to chat with their friends are not going to care, and might actually be a little confused by this announcement. "Wait, I need to buy a domain to use Bluesky?"
Now, I could be wrong, and Bluesky might be trying to get a bunch of high-flying corporate accounts on board first. In that case, they are doing the right thing, and I look forward to when large media orgs start posting on Bluesky.
> Apple is not likely to try and register iphone.apple.com on Namecheap.
Definitely not because that’s not how it works. They already own apple.com and can verify any subdomain they want. Plus, I think some of those domains are so valuable the company creates their own registrar to manage them. Ex: RegistrarSafe is a subsidiary of Facebook. They’re definitely not using a consumer grade registrar like Namecheap.
I think domains are complicated for the average user, but if you sell them as premium, globally unique handles for only $10-20 (ish) per year, that’ll create a lot of demand.
Even if it’s only appealing to business users, domains as identities make a lot of sense because it allows a business to be definitively recognized across the internet. There’s no ambiguity or impersonation.
I agree this might confuse users initially, but we need to normalize owning and using domains. We also need to make it much easier and this is an important step.
It’s not different from those goals. The way that creators own their relationship with their audience is by owning an identity not owned by the platform.
If you don’t attach a domain to your Bluesky profile, you get assigned yourname.bsky.social, which is inherently controlled by the platform. I’m glad that they are encouraging portable identities.
Why? Why is that the goal of a Twitter alternative? Their goal should be to get users on there asap with core Twitter functionality. Everything else is a P2.
Looks great. But maybe the effort should be going towards scaling up so they can remove the invite only requirement, Threads is going to actively eat Bluesky’s lunch while it remains.
90% of my timeline is on Threads is all stuff I don't even follow, while Bluesky is exactly what I ask for. Decentralized platforms are the only way to go, even if it's the centralized version and vision. The Zucc way of ramming (overly) suggested content and ads down your throat will die if there are alternatives.
Just federated identity, like OpenID. It doesn't necessitate distributed systems with communicating backends, like Mastodon or Usenet, just that it allows the user to bring their own IdP and therefore to have "sovereignty" to verify their own identity across platforms. The alternate route is to have users cryptographically certify their registrations post-hoc, e.g. Keybase
They've launched the 'sandbox' which is the federated/decentralised dev/staging environment. So yes, you can run your own PDS (server) and have it federate with others, but it's still very much in development and 'here be dragons'
Considering that "followed only" is far simpler to build, that's a pretty lame excuse and doesn't do anything to change my opinion about whether they're priorities are healthy.
I’m not a fan of that decision either. But I can understand why they added it first. Otherwise, when you sign up, you have empty feed and it’ll take a long time for you to get enough of content, as others subscribe, you follow them and they start posting.
With this decision they ensured you have content from the day one. Often irrelevant (which is risky), but TBH, I’ve found their algorithm to be ok. I’ll drop it as soon as possible, but for v0, I’m ok with it.
A less uncharitable interpretation of the parent comment is that decentralized platforms are the only way to guarantee personal freedom, save a saintly BDFL or government regulation. Not likely to happen.
The “even if it’s the centralized version” is an acknowledgement that some users may prefer centralization, or the platform is still too young to usefully decentralize. As long as there is a way out, or a credible plan, freedom is preserved.
The third Matrix succeeded due to choice—even at the subconscious level.
> The real test is not if we can build up a lot of hype, but if you all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time. And there are tons of basics that are missing: search, hashtags, a following feed, graph syncing, fedeverse support, messaging maybe…
>Wait, what does Threads show you if it doesn't have a following feed?
its like tiktok and twitter had a baby. it shows you content it thinks you will like based on how you use the app. i think? it's good at surfacing what i want to see based on my initial follows
IMO the jury is still out. Twitter was always more than just a UI format, Twitter-shaped text posts with my Instagram friends doesn’t scratch the same itch.
To sign up you need to choose to download the app and click sign up (it isn’t automatic from using your Instagram) so while integrating it with Insta gives it an easy leg up I don’t really see your comparison.
Let’s see how many stick around. Don’t get me wrong, I suspect you’re right. But given the promotion and ease of login I’m not at all surprised to see huge day one login numbers. The question is whether people like what they see enough to stick around.
I'm certainly not sticking around. I signed up, pulled over my follow list from IG, muted a bunch of brand accounts I didn't follow, realized the feed was 100% algorithmic, and haven't launched it again since.
Even if Threads is crap, it’s pretty obvious it’s gonna steal all of Twitter’s advertisers the moment they start showing ads, because the ad money generating users are moving onto Threads.
Heck, Threads doesn’t even need to show ads and the displacement of ad money away from Twitter will benefit Meta as much of that Twitter ad money will get redirected to Meta properties like FB and IG instead.
My Threads feed is full of massive brands promoting itselves already. Since you can't control the feed those are basically free ads. The only major difference will be that in the future those brands will be paying Meta for the privilege. Get the brands addicted with free engagement early on and then once they're good and hooked you start charging.
You can block them, which I’ve been doing more than I’d like today. I blocked Gary Vee, Wendy’s, the UFC, The Verge, Khloe Kardashian, and about a dozen more accounts I would never follow.
Also there's a bigger difference which is that FB/Meta ads are in an entirely different league of quality. The only ads I hear people IRL talking about actually buying and liking the products advertised to them are IG.
Sure, but those 1 billion people could have signed up for Twitter at any point in the last 17 years if they were interested. Twitter already maxed out its user base, so I'm skeptical that there's a 1 billion potential here.
Personally I signed up for threads and have been liking using it so far even though I never really used twitter. I think it has lower startup cost than Twitter because the algorithmic feed really works well without having to manually follow a lot of people. So I think there is reason for Zuck to dream big.
I've heard absolutely no one say anything positive about Threads. Mostly just that it shows you irrelevant content because there's no chronological timeline.
The dirty little secret about Bluesky is that it's actually pretty goddamn great on the inside. I have never in my life had normals asking for a social media invite, but I currently have a list of fourteen people waiting for a code.
It works, feels, tastes, shares, and functions like Classic Twitter without the waves of repugnant users or miserably overbaked features. Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy. Shit stays put and is there when you return to the app. The timeline is hard chronological and the utter lack of ads is delightful. Hashtag hash is not missed. Everything just works with a modicum of taste to boot.
Thanks for the cynicism but the quality of the platform is that I can currently, today, communicate with strangers and friends in good faith without being pelted by noxious crap or adtech gone asymptotic.
Maybe it'll all be the usual grim broken carnival barking shit when you have an account too, but for right now we're all twirling in a teacup here.
They intend to not move to ads. This domain name feature was described specifically by bluesky as the first attempt at bringing in revenue from other means
I mean, if by "exactly like twitter blue" you mean "charging people money for things" then sure. But you're generalizing beyond the point where the comparison is useful or a pejorative
Advocate for racial hierarchies, spread hateful messages about various minorities, promote subjugation for women and violence as purification for men. The usually nazi shit, although the ones with extra brain cells try to be coy about it.
> Collaborative mute lists make screening out horseshit easy.
Gotta have my filter bubble to protect me from 'misinformation.' At least this time it is crowdsourced so Jack doesn't even have to cooperate with any political campaigns.
What you want already exists. There's already tons of places online you can go to get a huge dose of conspiracy theories and racism. Your needs are met. Some of us would like to have places where that doesn't happen.
Right, the Hunter Biden laptop story censored by Twitter for the benefit of one political party during a presidential election was somehow misinformation and also a conspiracy theory and racism.
I find the complete unwillingness for everyone still moaning about misinformation to admit they were wrong about that laptop to be probably the most insane thing I've seen in my life. The laptop story wasn't even that important, but the incessant and belligerent lying or moving the goalposts about what happened is breathtaking.
If you ever want to admit you're wrong, I won't make fun of you.
Sometimes when you try a thing, you'll get it wrong, and that sucks. But that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. I'm not aware of any significant damage done by Twitter getting that one wrong, and the decision took place in an environment of increasing anti-Asian violence in the US[1]. I have a hard time blaming them for trying to do something within their power while there were real consequences for inaction and the jury was still out.
No one reputable cares/cared about that story. The people pushing it are/were right wing conspiracy nutters, the kind of people who chug horse dewormer and refuse life saving vaccines. I'm pleased to see them booted out of the spaces I inhabit.
Might be worth it to push through anyways. Twitter had its fail whales back in the day, I think a couple of temporary outages caused by demand might even be a good thing and add to the hype. Absence makes the heart grow fonder doesn't it? Seems silly to trade insane growth for perfectionism instead.
> The Bluesky infra would not be able to handle scale without invite-only clownshow. Meta can open the floodgates without breaking a sweat.
Honest question: are they emulating "classical Twitter" to the extent of going with self-hosted inefficient Rails implementation? Or what is their problem with scaling exactly in 2023 beyond ordering more instances in some AWS gui?
And as many of us have observed, the key isn't just the app or UI, it's that there are people there. With Threads, people are indeed there. Like it or not I think this means Bluesky is dead-on-didn't-arrive.
Is it any surprise Facebook got this right? Understanding "it's cool because there are people there" is part of their origin story, after all.
isn't Bluesky supposed to run on a federated protocol? They could just open source their reference implementation and let people run their own instances. Not even the protocol itself seems to be public.
That assumes that if open registration was enabled, people would be banging down the doors to create an account. Very unlikely unless Twitter straight up shuts down.
The threads app can pull in millions in a day because they can login with Instagram SSO, zero friction.
Everyone on bluesky loves the invite system because it has ensured growth doesn’t overwhelm still-developing features like how moderation works, it has encouraged people to generally invite non-assholes since their own reputation is at stake, etc.
making it a content platform with little content. and of that sparse content, most of it is meta-commentary on bluesky itself.
poasters post where the consumers are, and vice versa. Threads is on its way to bootstrapping this network effect in a way bluesky never even began to scratch due to the invite system and niche appeal
It's not like it's going to remain this way permanently, a lot is still under development. It's not just about infra scale, they are still hammering out things like how moderation will work, and that is the sort of thing best to iron out before the floodgates are opened.
Doesn't matter how good your social network product is if you don't catch the network effect early on. They are loosing a brutal battle against a billion dollar corp.
Google+ (and other GOOG social media upstarts) was… speical in its user conscription model and failed because of it. A place where they throw you to after handcuffing you on YouTube can't be too desirable.
Well Threads currently doesn’t even have a chronological, non-algo feed I can look at, whereas on bluesky you can have any number of feeds with whatever algo/logic you want. I don’t think I’ll be using Threads much while the one and only feed is the way it is.
And there’s more differences than just that, it’s a bit too soon to do a declaration of death I think
> Well Threads currently doesn’t even have a chronological, non-algo feed I can look at, whereas on bluesky you can have any number of feeds with whatever algo/logic you want.
None of that matters if the people you follow are on Threads but aren’t on Bluesky. And if the people you follow can’t get on Bluesky even if they wanted to, then off to Threads they will go and so everybody else will follow.
People being on Threads doesn't matter if Threads sucks. They'll all just go back to Twitter to wait for the Next Social Media.
>"looking at my Twitter feed is a breath of fresh air after spending 24 hours on Threads. My feed over there is just full of stuff I don’t want to see. Threads just hit 50 million users, but the top complaint is the feed which is the main part of the app"
But there's a key difference: If your friends aren't on Bluesky yet, it's quite possibly because they haven't gotten an invite code yet. Plenty of people are very interested and waiting to join. I've been inviting friends as I've received codes. It is an entirely different dynamic than just an unpopular social network, and it is perceived very differently (and not at all negatively).
We've been through this process once before with google+. It was the new SoMe which "everyone" wanted access to, but they nerfed their own growth with their invite system.
Sure, it chugged on for a few years, until it was inevitably killed-by-google.
You can customize feeds but there's barely any real content getting posted because the user base is so small. Some people with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter barely get any kind of engagement on Blue Sky. The dopamine hit just isn't showing up for big time posters.
> They had the chance of outrun threads but slept on it.
I don't think that's a fair criticism. Threads is backed by a $750 billion market cap megacorporation, while Bluesky just announced a seed round of $8 million, a mere drop in the bucket for Meta. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
Dorsey's net worth is something north of $4B, not to mention all the connections he has for investment. Raising a paltry $8M was not due to the difficulty of procuring money; not to attempting to scale rapidly was a deliberate choice. It's quite possibly going to end up a very bad choice.
Seems pretty clear typical users don't care about decentralization, verification for themselves, or algorithm customization at all. They just want to post and look at nonsense.
I'm not sure what will become of Bluesky, but I don't think it'll the Twitter replacement. Seems more like a classic case of developing for power users instead of typical ones.
Jack provided the initial funding 2 years ago, but despite all the chatter to the contrary, it doesn't appear to me that he's involved in the company much these days. On Bluesky, he's not very active, and it's not clear he believes in the platform. His most recent post (https://bsky.app/profile/jack.bsky.social/post/3jy3cth45t22r) was 23 days ago, and states that Bluesky "isn't a [Twitter] replacement". He seems to be much more into Nostr these days, judging by his tweets.
It's a very fair criticism. FB has spent the past year shedding 000s of jobs, losing untold billions on metaverse and turning IG into Tiktok.
Dorsey couldn't manage get a head start even with all that? If anything I'd think he was a CEO that gets easily distracted by the next shiny thing (Square, crypto, Nostr), which really doesn't bode well for Bluesky.
> FB has spent the past year shedding 000s of jobs, losing untold billions on metaverse and turning IG into Tiktok.
This just shows that Meta has a massive amount of resources available. They could afford to hire like crazy, which they did, and they could afford to lose untold billions. How many 000s of jobs and billions of dollars can Bluesky lose? (Zero.)
> Dorsey couldn't manage get a head start even with all that?
> gets easily distracted by the next shiny thing (Square, crypto, Nostr)
No, that's his main thing. He was distracted by also being CEO of Twitter, and Twitter suffered from that. He seemed like just a glorified mascot, on Twitter to shill for his other stuff. Remember also that Bluesky started as a Twitter project, but it basically got tossed out by Twitter after the Musk acquisition (along with almost everyone else).
I will never even consider using threads, because I will never use Instagram/Facebook. Even Twitter I only reluctantly had an account to follow specific individuals for information. I have a mastodon account but I don’t like it very much.
I will wait to try Bluesky. If it dies before I get the chance, then I won’t be using anything at all. Threads is not an option.
It might not be dead, but it has definitely dropped the ball.
My timeline on Bsky somehow always show people taking a dig at other rivals, and self congratulations. People regularly diss twitter, Mastodon and now the feed is full of people dissing on Threads. This bsky-is-not-twitter identity that bsky network latches onto will be detrimental to itself.
Also there are no federated servers anywhere in sight so far.
I see this on Mastodon too unfortunately. Too much chatter about "the others". Unfortunately many of these people are refugees from Twitter and appear to be in a perpetual state of trying to make the replacement feel like Twitter in '09.
None of them feel special, they all feel like the same thing. I still think there’s something else out there that will sneak up and take the short form social crown. At least I hope there is.
Lot of negative comments here but IMO this is huge. The best way to keep anything commercial good in the long term is competition, and the only way to have competition with web services is if users can go somewhere else, which requires a portable identity/username and open protocols. Bluesky is currently the only platform offering both in a convenient package. Even Mastodon doesn't make it this easy[0].
Ideologically these Twitter exodus communities will become even more microcosmic than the presumed "alt-right, redpilled" ideology they purport to escape. Twitter may be these things in part, but by being a direct reaction away from these things, the new networks will become necessarily more niche and specialized ideologically.
In the same way that the ideological specialization of Twitter is not helpful for its growth, these new networks will be likewise more of an echo-chamber, and regardless of the "correctness" of their ideology, the unilaterality of it will starve it of the multifaceted discourse which provides the "town square" functionality which is core to these platforms' ethos.
using big words doesn’t make this intellectual. people want to make jokes and have light hearted conversations with others without hatred spewing everywhere. it’s pretty simple.
As I said, my point is irrespective of the righteousness of any particular ideologies. Your reflexive ideological defense buttresses my position of ideological segregation prompting the twitter exodus.
If you desire light hearted discussion, I suggest avoiding nonresponsive arguments and implications of pseudointellectualism.
I get it. less diversity of thought means more echo chambers. you're saying that fundamentally these platforms will fail to be the town squares they want to be by doing that. and I'm saying that most people do not want a town square, they just want a dinner party without the village idiots.
in your metaphor, my point is that the table that started with village idiots at it and scared some people away still has more diversity of thought than the table who have self-selected a new table.
I just don't think people necessarily want it. most are just looking to enjoy themselves.
that doesn't mean we don't _need_ what you're talking about, I just think there are people pushing two very different directions, what masses want vs what society needs
It is fine, there's a huge diversity in social media right now. I don't think Bluesky has a good narrative for any particular kind of user. I don't think it's going to hit cozy web status being an open air massively global network. The hallmark of the cozy web is a mix of private/semi-open/actually niche communities.
Too late IMO. Twitter the incumbent, Threads just popped up out of nowhere with a whole heap of users.
People switch when other people switch, generally. Those tired of Twitter now have an easy place to call home, there's not going to be any momentum to then want to switch again.
Mastodon tried, and did get some following, but IMO is too complicated in concept for the common user. Bsky on the other hand just blew it.
One of the main open questions is how abuse will be handled. Mastodon is operated by volunteers with little extra time, in the worst case you handle abuse by just de-federating from an entire instance. Saves time for Mastodon mods. I don't think you can do that with Threads?
Bluesky is going down the VC path, and we all know how this ends ups for social media companies. Sure, they'll try to monetize without ads. But it's unclear to me what kind of revenue stream would generate enough cash. Sure as hell it won't be this Namecheap thing.
In my opinion, the only way to go for a social media company is to be a non-profit.
Namecheap is the worst company possible for this, because it's trivial to trick them into removing domains. Here's a reminder that a troll managed to get them to remove domains, through Twitter, by claiming that they were run by Russians.
Could you back that up? The irony of anyone accepting that Namecheap fell for a "trust me bro" with a source of "trust me bro" is funny, but I'd also like to read more
My peer texted me his personal blog that is an xyz domain three separate times. Finally, he got frustrated and asked why I was ignoring his article he wrote that he was really proud of and was only responding to his other texts. It turns out T-Mobile blocks xyz domains outright over sms, which led to our awkward moment. We had a good laugh about it, but it made me realize that xyz domains are not reliable for even a personal blog (and also reaffirmed sms is a very poor medium for text communication).
I don't understand the emphasis on "identity management" or "account portability". It has from the beginning been the single justification I have heard from the atproto people for reinventing the ActivityPub wheel.
One thing that is good about the internet has always been that nobody needs to know you're a dog. That you can move between worlds and identities as much as you want. That there is a hard break between my identity, and my social media accounts. I don't want a social security number on the internet!
This push here to decentralize oddly seems to amount to a kind of centralization of the one thing regular users probably dont want centralized! People like having alts, characters, fungible and plural accounts. Atproto argues that, in fact, this a problem to solve, and enough of one to justify creating an entire protocol to compete with activitypub. I am just not convinced of that pitch.
Could be a huge boon to the self-hosted movement, might reach the critical mass of users that are willing to fund open source development of self-hosted cloud, just BYO domain
Yes, but it may mean that many people may be buying domains for the first time, and then realising that that opens the door to self hosting many other services.
i've been following art communities on twitter, and while threads have indeed taken off massively, there's still a surprising amount of interest on bluesky, and there are people who are joining both, even after threads' opening up. there are several anecdotes of people not liking threads because of its corporate cleanliness.
so no, bluesky isn't as dead as you may think. if anything it's gonna be as big as mastodon, as much as it pains me to say that as a fediverse advocate.
I just want auto-renew to work properly sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't, lost a couple of high value domain names even tho they've had my CC for years.
I once let my Hotmail account go 30 or 90 days without a login, so Microsoft followed their policy to delete my email and open the username to the public. Someone saw my email on dns records, found it was available, registered the email and stole my domain.
Extremely bitter about that ~17 years later. Extremely.
That is mortifying and cruel. It's unfortunate that Microsoft didn't prevent registration of expired emails for a set period of time. They had to have an idea that this type of situation would occur. I'm tempted to ask what the domain was...
It is always a little bit bizarre to see things like this. Domains are generally for organisations, for good reason: they cost money to acquire, they're globally unique, and they cost money to run.
Identity is a funny thing, and certainly online it is ambiguous because most of us think of it as being in some way absolute: we have our identities regardless of context, and we want our technology to reflect that.
I'd argue in reality our identities are functions of association. Groups we're part of, etc. Online identity as-is is like that, but with a feudal relationship between the "domain administrators" and the people who associate with them.
The right answer isn't to atomise identity (that's technically pretty hard to do anyway) but to make those identity-and-means-of-communication hosts into bonafide associations, owned by their members, operated for their benefit, and operated as constitutional democracies with rights to protect minorities and elections to the organisation's board, committees, or key executive positions.
We in tech need to get past the idea that the social problems that have emerged from the internet have technical solutions. Maybe some do, but the vast majority do not.
This was such a missed opportunity by the community, because app.net was the best implementation of a Twitter alternative ever made. Better than Bluesky, better than Mastodon, better than Threads, etc.
I quit Twitter in 2012 and joined app.net. It was great! But not enough people did that to make app.net last. I still think about what we could have had instead of the current lineup of crap. :-(
> Not in terms of control but in terms of floating the idea of paying an annual subscription fee.
Where did you see that, other than the general idea of "paid services"?
What was great about it? Its model made no sense tbh. Pay $50/year for an API key to a twitter like platform that nobody is using. Anybody can create an app, but you have to pay them separately. The branding made no sense, “app.net” a microblogging platform? It felt like the only people who ever signed up to app.net were ex-third party twitter developers who felt burned by twitter’s 2012 changes. Their development track seem to be just “hey this thing is popular now, let’s spend 2 years and deliver a half-assed limited implementation for it too late.”
Technically, app.net was a full-fledged Twitter clone, with twice the character limit of Twitter at the time. It was every bit as good as Twitter. As a centralized service, it didn't have the annoying, confusing friction of federated Mastodon, and it wasn't nearly as primitive as Bluesky, which is still very bare bones.
The best part was the community. Almost all of the toxicity of Twitter was absent. And no spam, no bots, or other crap like that.
> Pay $50/year for an API key
You weren't paying for an API key. You had a username and password like Twitter or any other social network. There was a full web interface, as well as native apps, just like Twitter.
And it had RSS feeds, which Twitter had just abolished in 2012.
> The branding made no sense, “app.net” a microblogging platform?
Sure, that was a bit weird. They pivoted to a social network from a previous venture.
> It felt like the only people who ever signed up to app.net were ex-third party twitter developers who felt burned by twitter’s 2012 changes.
Not true. Replace "developers" with "users".
Initially, there were a lot of signups for app.net. The problem was that people didn't quit Twitter. I personally quit Twitter and deleted my account, but most other people didn't fully commit to app.net and kept their Twitter accounts, so they found themselves splitting their time, which isn't a great experience, and a lot of their personal network was still only on Twitter. In the end, Twitter's network effect defeated app.net.
If people only knew in 2012 what Twitter would become in 2022...
app.net was supposed to make sense as a name because it was supposed to be like a Sandstorm or Chrome Web Store for social apps, with a feed engine like getstream.io at its core.
It was vaporware that eventually launched after I stopped being interested in it, and seemed to always be sidetracked from its stated mission.
Here's where they seemed to focus on trying to build their own killer app rather than on third party apps:
> Could Broadcast be app.net’s breakout app? It depends on how quickly it can corral a large base of users on the publishing side — and it could also depend on whether Twitter and Facebook make moves toward selective push notifications, too.
Bluesky is currently better than threads, technically.
The content on Bluesky is lacking, i know it’s because of the invite only system, and that has its advantages and disadvantages but Bluesky is going to run into a problem soon.
They obviously need content and users to stay alive, and the content is lacking. Currently it’s a very niche group of users who have a very distinct culture. They don’t leave much room for differing ideas.
It will be interesting watching this play out. They are positioned in a way that can beat threads, but they need to drop the invite ASAP and manage their onboarding of new users.
That means the culture will inevitably change, I’m not sure I see a way of it staying the same as normal people and more fringe people sign up.
IMO they should prioritize content creators. Engaging content on the platform that’s rich will be a huge leg up when they open up.
Helps too that currently i can’t even post a picture on threads without it crashing. Blue sky is definitely the more delightful sop to use.
I don't get the argument that scaling is harder for startups than for Big Tech.
1. At Meta, you had to use internal "approved" tooling to build you product. which is far worse than products in open market. BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day.
2. If funds are an issue, then raise more. There's no way around it. you had to scale sometime. Even if you optimise well, you'll still burn a huge amount supporting free users.
3. Threads was built by 10 Engineers. A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways.
I feel the founders are largely responsible for not having their priorities sorted out.
> BlueSky can put it all on serverless like AWS Lambda and call it a day.
> If funds are an issue, then raise more.
This is exactly the cancer that’s eating most modern services. Burn money, raise money, burn money, have investors holding you by the balls demanding profitability over a massively expensive inefficient system, shove ads everywhere, degrade experience. Add more haphazard money-pit feature to drive value. Burn more money. Rinse and repeat.
> A simple MVP shouldn't have a massive team behind it anyways
This is true, but not for a social media app that’s expecting (or wanting) hundreds of millions of free non-paying users. Opening the floodgates, then optimizing after the fact worked in the 2000s, but it doesn’t work today. It’s a good way to repeat and be stuck in the cycle above.
Meta has a $750 billion market cap and just slapped Threads on top of the Instagram database. How do you achieve the same with a startup and AWS Lambda?
When are we going to be able to USE BlueSky..? Looks like Meta has beaten Jack to the Punch and released their Twitter replacement... Who's to say anyone will wanna use BSky once people are integrated into Threads
Somehow, this BlueSky reminds me of Okuna(previously Open.social). It was invite only, very enthusiastic community iniviting only handful sane(non-arehle) people and everyone was suggesting good features. Founders were committed to non-ad revenue via various premium features etc… and then slowly community died down slowly, posts stopped, early users inactive for months and one day it just closed door with a small message that it is hard to build social network etc etc…
I hope BlueSky doesn’t go in the way of Okuna(and lot of similar ones before it).
This all seems to be missing the point. What does using DNS for your identity do for your actual data? Your data is still going to be on whichever platform you log on to, and otherwise wouldn't we want to be able to make a unique ID for each service?
Really, if you want a consistent, permanent ID, we might as well use our government IDs everywhere...
An explicit goal of AT protocol is data portability. DNS gives you identity portability, since otherwise you’d still be locked in to the platform that owned your identity.
Thats cool and all, but give me my invite already. Been on the waitlist since they first announced last year and still waiting for it till this day.
I've tried the selfhostable pds and its definitely looking good, the ability to selfhost our data ourselves. Plus like the article promoted, the ability to link username to our own domain name.
> Bluesky offers an additional layer of privacy protection by acting as your domain registrar agent. We do not register your personal information with the WHOIS directory, which is a searchable database that holds information on domain ownership.
So is Bluesky the registrant of these domains, not the end-user?
I'm weary of tying my domain registrar to social media. One of the nice things about owning my domain is that I can control it -- if I get banned on bluesky, a much more likely occurrence than CloudFlare kicking me out, what's the policy of transferring out?
It’s unclear to me who is the registrant in this scenario.
If blue sky then you don’t own anything and there is no portability.
If you are the registrant that’s great but namecheap is going to need contact information that’s verifiable which may turn people off who would like a bit more separation on their social profiles. I also wonder does blue sky see that registrant data? Can’t say I like that very much.
It works in a similar way that lets encrypt DNS challenge works. They just partnered with Namecheap to make the process simple because asking people to buy a domain and setup TXT records is still a fairly complicated and technical process. Apple does the same with iCloud emails and Cloudflare domains.
lol, and I thought Mastodon was a conspiracy by Big Janky Off-Brand Domain Name.
but really, Bluesky users have spent the past two months going wild with novelty domain names. You can pay $1 for the first year for all manner of stupid funny names, and people do.
For anyone here that would be easy - but for non-techies you can see the use case for a service that does it for them.
This really is just providing a convenient service that this specific userbase demonstrably wants.
If anyone else wanted to do the same they could, nobody's stopping you. But this is an actual service for Bluesky's users.
"Bluesky’s seed round was led by Neo, a community-led firm with partners like Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi and former Twitter PM Suzanne Xie, the company noted in its announcement. Joining the round were various angel investors, including Joe Beda (co-creator of Kubernetes), Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of Replit, Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, Jeromy Johnson, Automattic, Protocol Labs, Sarah Drasner, Katelyn Donnelly, Ali Evans, Stav Erez, Kris Nóva, Brad Fitzpatrick, Abdul Ly, and others."
This looks interesting, but it seems like it would lead to some pretty long and cumbersome user names. It also doesn’t address the problem of the moment: everyone who was itching to leave Twitter already have a place to go and based on Thread’s sign-ups, they are already moving in large numbers. Are most people going to want to move again whenever Bluesky opens its gates? I think the answer is no, unless Meta/Threads really screws something up. Threads isn’t great, but it’s …adequate and likely will improve quickly. That might be good enough for most people.
I doubt it. There are so many TLDs now that everyone can have a reasonably decent domain on a thematic TLD. All of those have premium pricing schemes that are unattractive to domainers for the really good domains.
You want to have all of that toxicity--if it must exist--concentrated in a single place. Every new service shouldn't create a new namespace with its own hoard of asshats squatting usernames, and every time I join a new service I shouldn't have to jostle to get a username compatible with the ones I already have. If you use a hostname, you figure out your hostname once and then know that all subsequent services you ever use will have a single correct username.
I’m not positive this is a winner for normie users. The exclusivity of a user name is important, I want @mark, not @mark.abcdef while I know there is an @mark.abcdęf out there.
It might not be a thing for “normie” users, but the tech-overlapping crowd has been all about domain name based handles for quite a bit, and many are registering domains specifically because of it. This isn’t something they’re doing on a whim, they’re doing it in direct response to demand.
Two @ symbols? I think you're thinking of how Mastodon works. Bluesky doesn't work that way. Your username is the domain itself, not @username@domain. If you own the domain brian.pizza, your username can be @brian.pizza. If many users will share a domain, they are simply given a subdomain -- @brian.someserver.lol, etc.
But you see, there is no @mark. There is @mark.bsky.social (on the app instance that we currently call Blue Sky) but when federation happens and people start running their own instances, those users will be namespaced on a different domain (@mark.marksinstance.io, @mark.someinterest.club, etc.) Right now snagging a coveted handle early still feels nice like you would expect, but its uniqueness and the ability to use the name sans-domain when referencing will be gone if/when decentralization happens.
Well, only one person is going to get @mark, so this certainly isn't any worse for normal users than "every service forces you to get a bespoke username" as in practice you end up being mark_h.23 or something ridiculous like that.
The thing is, there is no @mark, if you have @mark on bluesky, your username is actually @mark.bsky.social. Every user is attached to a domain name no matter what, so this feature lets you at least use your own instead of theirs.
Bare minimum but fast message passing as a social communication layer.
If all of these new platforms are trying to become a better or more bloated version of what Twitter has become, then they will never catch on like the viral tool that Twitter originally was.
None of them learned the lesson of google wave, it seems. (i.e. look at these really cool features and extensions, this is what you want right?)