Jay here: this is a transition I've been working towards for awhile, and I'm looking forward to advancing the vision and ecosystem as CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Toni has been an advisor to us for years, and I personally recruited him to take over as CEO while I focus on new projects within the company. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.
Question about Bluesky and Persona integration. As i understand there are plans to delegate government id verifications to Persona? (https://withpersona.com)
Is there any discussion somewhere about adding in the data that makes the x.com/twitter recommend/ranker so functional?
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?
(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.)
Personally, I really like that my feeds aren't getting that level of granular detail. I prefer the explicit control I have with 'Show more like this' and 'Show less like this'.
I generally think that. But letting dwell time/clicks/open-rates expand the recommender and then (bound to swipe) 'disinterested'/'show less like this' to cull has been pretty efficient. I used to feel dumped into simclusters and now I see a more specific subset of posts I prefer (while still casting what feels like a wide net).
I really liked when bsky introduced the 'show more/less' and then expanded it to custom feeds. But I'm afraid the recommender systems work better with more data. And I think the feed operator alone gets sent a limited set of interactions?
I'm not exactly sure how it would work in atproto but I could imagine an enriched 'graph-interactivity' where you can turn on and off which/how much signal/privacy you want.
How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.
I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.
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.
I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. 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.
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.
> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose
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.
> Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.
Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.
> 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 want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.
> Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.
Here is a link to your comment about not having seen it in the context of the discussion you are posting in. When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context they are not talking about a meme from several years before Bluesky existed but rather a specific event (which I have apparently failed to communicate to you).
> I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.
That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.
> 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.
I was talking about the topic of the thread, you seem kind of focused on swearing and insulting people. My bad, I hadn’t seen your other posts and did not realize how much this subject has flustered you.
> When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context
That makes sense. The original meme was widespread and this is fairly niche.
> That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.
No man, I really mean it. Maybe it's hostile, but also, people talking about this legitimately sound, I don't know... unhinged? Off? I am flustered, because of how ridiculous this all is to me. I'm serious.
Like, "the CEO of blue sky said waffles to me and it was a 4d comedy dunk!" or whatever. It's like a Ralph Wiggum quote. What the fuck?
So, I think this topic is at its end. But really, read aloud what you wrote. Seriously, try it, you might find it grounding.
It is ok if you just didn’t/don’t know what people were talking about, I hope you are doing well.
To put my point as simply as possible for someone that isn’t ‘terminally online’ and understands that ‘posting isn’t praxis’ but also uses those phrases unprompted: People have criticized Jay for getting Poster’s Madness because of a time when she, as an admin, appeared to respond to any criticism saying everybody else has Poster’s Madness.
im also one of those people who is struggling to understand why people seem so passionate. its a twitter clone.
i also dont know whats going on, although it is a obscure drama from a relatively small community
i think maybe that is this disconnect. that relatively small community is extremely important to you but many other people here lack similar footing. i dont think the hostility is warranted but i can feel myself furrowing my brow and asking out loud what is happening when i read some of the posts from bluesky users in this thread
i guess i am glad i never got big into twitter or bluesky or the attention economy
> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.
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.
The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]
The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".
"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.
>“Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others,”
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)
In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private, even if it was made publicly accessible. But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.
> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably be considered private.
How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service? The information was public and did not identify the person.
> 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, or whether it in any way identified a person.
I think this entire thread has run its course; if it's not this detail, it'll be another, as a few others have already moved goalposts further down the discussion than the ones you're setting here.
But if you wish to sate personal curiosity, it is in his Substack, linked from the first link I posted, which was itself from the link posted by its GP.
The only thing that seems remotely related to your claims is this:
When the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey began an investigation, [Reed] said she handed over the spreadsheet, after scrubbing out the personally identifying information that could spark HIPAA problems. She shared a copy of it with me as well — it contains 17 alleged detransitioners or desisters and 60 allegedly worrisome cases.
What's your problem with what happened exactly? Is it your position that your "private information" cannot be used, ever, to expose what some see as a medical scandal, even though it cannot identify you or in any way be associated with you? What does "private" even mean to you if sharing this dataset did not violate HIPAA?
> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private.
I'd love to see the limitations of this opinion you definitely hold honestly and without favor.
You started by posting a change.org petition that links to a deleted post - in other words an "appeal to petition" that has no evidence. Now you are suggesting there is another leak that was published (presumably not mentioned in this petition?) that also has no evidence. Where is the evidence?
Everything from an actual search engine request for these posts (which to be clear, are deleted) suggests that these are anonymized and public, and contain no identifying information.
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.
There aren't really any, the user you're replying to is just disappointed the campaign to ban users for no (on platform, or really any) reason was not successful.
I don't care about the specific situation either way; What I am observant of is how the core team has handled their userbase and lack of protocol robustness.
Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.
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.
What do you compare this userbase to? Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? HN? All of these places have similar or worse userbase and worse filtering/blocking options than bsky.
If they want to remain a niche echo-chamber platform rather than become a major social network, that would be an appropriate strategy. However, I expect they have higher ambitions.
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.
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").
Eh, AP has its own sets of problems (underspecified protocol, split-brained on discoverability, new developments are met with hostility in the community)
It's my understanding that Toni was so uninterested in bsky that his account was inactive. What makes Toni the right person at the helm, even in the interim?
I'm glad you were able to reach your goal, been following your professional journey since I met you at a silicon valley event 10 years ago, looking forward to what you do with the ecosystem
With the new CEO in place, are there any plans to deal with the obnoxious userbase of Bluesky, and perhaps try to expand it out to reach people who don't exhibit such high levels of toxicity?
Yes, in the case of Twitter/X. A considerably wider range of expressed preference&opinion is permitted there before platform moderators will aggressively ban or users start flag/report brigades.
As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go- it's not the fault of Graber or anyone else- but they should allow people to turn off the turbo redditor type people with a few settings.
> As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go
Very surprised to hear this... the few times I've visited Twitter in the last year I've been met with a deluge of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic comments. Like there's practically no moderation on there. People saying "Hitler was right the whole time" and shit like that.
I don't use Bluesky much either but I definitely wouldn't have considered it worse than Twitter
Twitter still attracts top quality initial posts from prominent people, even though the replies are garbage, or worse. Honestly, it doesn't compute to me how people can justify continuing to contribute there.
Its not worse than twitter. It's not close in compared to toxicity; though i've personally noticed a high-minded snobbishness toxicity that shuts down discussion on it.
The response was to someone commenting the discourse on Bluesky was "off putting" so they went back to Twitter.
I wasn't touching on freedom of speech, just the relative quality of speech in both platforms.
As a centralized service operating in Canada and the EU though, I do believe Twitter is legally required to remove certain kinds of hate speech. The qualification for removal might be debatable (e.g. "the Austrian painter was right" is another thing people say which is a dogwhistle, but probably not explicit enough for companies to be compelled to remove it) but the requirement is there.
> but I'm sure you hold dear the right to say whatever you want, whether others agree with it or not
You know, reflecting back on my youth, I wish certain things I said (and might have posted on social media had it been so present) were immediately stricken from the record. Banning hate speech which incites violence against a minority group is a slippery slope, but I think it's for the better. At the same time, of course it can be abused, such as with the IHRA definition of antisemitism used in many jurisdictions, under which many valid criticisms of Israel would be deemed "antisemitic"
Spewing stuff like what? Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father (a proud Zionist and Mossad agent) was the co-founder of McGraw Hill, the second largest textbook publishing company in the US. Are you trying to tell me a proud Zionist who is publishing textbooks is making it his priority to ensure they paint an objective picture of history in relationship to Israel? My textbooks (whether in High School or University) certainly didn't talk about the Sabbateans or Jacob Frank / Frankism - yet understanding their history is critical to anything approaching objectivity.
What I expect is for all narratives to be able to be questioned, and not for there to be one that is unquestionable. When narratives can't be questioned, it's a pretty good indicator that something is being lied about.
> This is a perfect example of when I think freedom of speech restrictions (such as laws criminalizing Holocaust denial) are a net positive.
Of course you think that, because you don't want to have an objective conversation about the events that took place, you want a single narrative to prevail unquestioningly.
> My grandparents were holocaust survivors, so I know directly from them what they went through, and I know about my family members who were killed.
I'm sure they were. Just like I'm sure the number of survivors keeps increasing as the years go on. Wild how that happens.
> I have no sympathy for people who publicly spread lies and misinformation to deny or downplay the severity of any genocide.
Convenient when you can brush off what Israel is doing by claiming it's not a genocide.
> Sorry not sorry.
I typically don't expect pathological liars and pathological victims to be sorry about much.
You basically can, can't you, with it's robust blocking features and feeds?
Personally, I've found bsky has a far healthier culture than Twitter, even before Musk turned it into his own personal megaphone/therapist and neo-nazi safe-space (and I follow a lot of political accounts)
The lack of payouts for engaging posts and the robust blocking really does change the incentive structure over there. That twitter-style toxic engagement-bait type posting doesn't get rewarded as much.
There are some far-left groups there who are very toxic and will harass some people, but they are easy to block. Most of them seem to block people at the drop of a hat anyways, and so end up in their own isolated bubbles.
I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.
At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.
It's insufferable, yes. Even though I'm a left-liberal, it feels foreign to me. Twitter is worse at the limit (endless neo-Nazis and Maoists) but at least I feel some diversity while I'm there. Bluesky is so uniform in the annoyingness of its community.
What thunder? Mastodon has had nearly a decade to go mainstream and it's still mostly tech enthusiasts explaining to their friends what an 'instance' is.
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.
This isn’t Mastodon so a “Bluesky server” isn’t a thing.
Mastodon is shaped like email so you have “servers” sending messages to each other.
Atproto is shaped more like RSS with aggregation. Everyone posts data to their hosting (which anyone could move at any time), and apps like Bluesky aggregate data from everyone’s hosting.
So a concept like “Bluesky server” is nonsensical. What you have is “atproto hosting” (which can be provided by Bluesky, by other communities, by other companies, or can be self-hosted — it’s all open source and you can even implement your own) and “Bluesky app” (of which there’s only one — but there are forks like Blacksky which fork the entire stack including the server). There also “other atproto apps” like https://leaflet.pub, https://tangled.org, etc, which have nothing to do with Bluesky.
I made my account on a server that a personal friend span up. Said friend deleted it on a whim after a few months after not using it much, not really aware of the implications. Personal connection was not the issue here, ownership of my digital identity was.
Counterpoint - its a legal requirement in several parts of the world now (and rapidly expanding), how do you think they should handle it whilst you know...still being able to exist?
Sure, which is why it's perfectly possible to work around those restrictions using any of the alternative apps that show the same data (but don't implement the legal restrictions).
It kinda of confuses me when use the term "nation state" instead of just "state". For example Canada is not a nation-state but surely they are powerful and important enough that they could also pursue this kind of case.
I don't know why people have to be like this. Are you not capable of asking the question without the aggressive snark? Just be cool for a second and maybe you'll get an actual conversation where you learn something.
Let me explain how to ask this without being an ineffective rage dork: 'I don't have age verification laws in my country but was blocked anyway. Why is that?'
