Might feel more open if people didn’t need a fucking invite code to join, but ok.
It’s not the worst idea. Tons of software goes through “closed betas,” or “canary builds,” or invite-only phases like this to test at scale, in a production-like scenario, but without opening the floodgates and getting inundated with issues reported by regular people. Heck even Fediverse websites sometimes close their registration pages if they’re getting more signups than the admins/mods can handle. And that makes perfect sense, the last thing you want is to suddenly become unsustainably huge. It leads to a kind of social rot: trolls run free without enough mods to stop them, spammers run rampant, etc.
This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it “billionaire-proof”
is it really though? From what I understand even in the federated mode all accounts have to be verified by a central server? I dunno, maybe it’s fake news, but I don’t for second trust a social network created by a billionaire.
From what I understand even in the federated mode all accounts have to be verified by a central server?
Not all, but currently most are. The long-term account identifiers are DIDs, and they currently support two DID methods: the w3c-standardized
did:webmethod (which makes your identity reliant on your DNS name), and bluesky’s centralizeddid:plcmethod (which gives you a verifiable cryptographic identity not reliant on you keeping a domain renewed, but which they are responsible for the availability of and could censor).The log of all operations on the centralized
did:plcserver is public and auditable, though, so, if i understand correctly, if/when they do censor it that can be detected and people can/will make the various components of the system use uncensored mirrors of it to continue using censoreddid:plcidentities. And other people will choose to usedid:webfor their identities and be subject to the DNS rules instead (and this choice will be invisible to other users; all implementations are expected to support both methods).In my opinion, the decoupling of long-term identity from everything else (including your display name, which is also DNS-based but can be changed at any time) is a pretty good idea, and I expect they’ll probably support more than these two DID methods in the future.
Thank you for the explanation. I’m curious what this will look like in the UI and UX.
did:webdoesn’t seem like something that the majority can/will use. It makes on easily identifiable by DNS (probably even with whois protection).We shall see how it pans out.
That’s why our biggest priority right now is launching federation, which is timelined for early next year. This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it “billionaire-proof” — you’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too.
You’d think “one of the core features” would’ve been present from the start rather than maybe, possibly, hopefully being added Soon™. Mastodon exists. Just use that.
Fuck billionaires
I have mixed feelings on bluesky, but in any case its continued development is very bad for twitter so I consider this a net positive any way you look at it
I literally have no idea why you would use that when there’s already Mastodon, stable and already open to anyone.
It’s good to have alternatives but i’m not waiting for Bluesky
