| HN Mirror

I’m not really read up on it, but I think Bluesky and Twitter are not really operating in the same space, and certainly not in the same way. Bluesky is building a protocol and selling a hosting platform. I started thinking about that model years ago, making a social protocol makes sense and it’s time for a Mastodon for the masses.

Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.

If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.

From their site https://atproto.com/:

Federated social

Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.

Algorithmic choice

Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.

Portable accounts

Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity

Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.

I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.