Kirsle.net
I had originally written this post on my NSFW blog back around May of this year. With the recent surge of interest in Bluesky, I thought I would copy it over here to my tech blog to give it some wider visibility.
Bluesky is a very interesting app, and it is different in some important ways to Twitter and the others that came before it.
Bluesky will not enshittify over time like its predecessors have. On the surface, it appears to be "just another Twitter" but the real interesting technology is happening under the hood. Bluesky is being developed in such a way that Bluesky (the corporation) can let go of it and allow it to be distributed as an open source, open standard network that is not under the control of a single corporation who could one day destroy it.
Below I will paste my original blog post with some of the NSFW paragraphs edited out for the different audience that I have on Kirsle.net.
I've been on Bluesky for about 4 months now and have learned a bit more about how it works and I find it rather interesting, so I thought I'd write about it and give some advice on how to get started and especially how to find your fellow nudists & exhibitionists there. So, in a similar spirit to my Getting started with Mastodon post, I'll write about Bluesky especially for an audience of people who aren't already using it. And even if you are already on Bluesky, maybe you'll learn something cool from this post anyway!
Compared to Mastodon, getting started on Bluesky is fairly simple right now: there is only one front-end web server available so far, at https://bsky.app/ where you can go and sign up in a familiar way like any other site you've used. Bluesky intends to support federated instances in the future (and they've made some good progress on that, so far), which I'll get into below, but for now at least you can avoid the choice paralysis of needing to find a server to sign up on like you have with Mastodon.
In this post I'll tell you about how content discovery works, how adult content is tagged and how to find your people to follow. And I'll also go into what's especially interesting about the way that Bluesky works as compared to Mastodon and the rest of the related fediverse.
First, let's address the elephant in the room. On Mastodon, the general sentiment about Bluesky is one of negative skepticism, and many people on Mastodon talk shit about Bluesky and compare it to Twitter. After Elon Musk took over Twitter and started making a lot of people very upset, a lot of them flocked over to Bluesky and the folks on Mastodon say things like "you're moving from one platform created by a billionaire, to another platform created by a billionaire, and you think this time it's going to be different? Have you learned nothing?"
Well, to that I say: this time it absolutely can be different, because Bluesky is not just another centralized website controlled by a corporation in the way that Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are. The key technology behind Bluesky is called the AT Protocol which is being developed and released as an open source standard for federated web services, and Bluesky is only one app that runs on the AT Protocol. The thing with an open standard is that everybody can participate in it, and people can write their own custom apps that use it, and they can all inter-operate with all the other apps using it, and once that's out in the wild there is no controlling it or governing it from the top down.
Mastodon is a good example of this: the server-to-server language behind the scenes on Mastodon is called ActivityPub - it's what allows Mastodon servers to be hosted by many different organizations or individuals and still allow you to follow and comment on people anywhere else. And Mastodon is far from the only ActivityPub app: Pixelfed and PeerTube are just a couple of other examples. So, despite the origin of Bluesky having been started by a billionaire as an internal project at Twitter, the technology they are building to run it on is to be a distributed open standard.
The problems we faced with centralized sites like Twitter, where a change in ownership or a pivot in business strategy left all their users held hostage, aren't nearly as possible with federated services like Mastodon because you can simply move to a server run by somebody you trust better. There's no way it can be enshittified from the top-down in the way a centralized platform will be.
Now, it is fair to remain skeptical of Bluesky until full federation and open-source self-hosting becomes possible. They are actively developing the AT Protocol and, while third-party developers are already writing code to support it, the system is not fully open and ready yet. The down side of building an open standard is that, once it's out there, you've lost control of the direction it will evolve. It's important to design it the best as you can in the beginning, which is why Bluesky has been going at such a slow pace. But, they've been continually making good progress: it is now possible to self-host your data on your own server and complete data migration of your account to your own server is working (and is much more fully featured than a Mastodon account migration, which I'll get more into below).
So, let's get into the user experience of Bluesky. You've created a new account and have a lot of questions, like: how do I find people to follow? How is "adult content" tagged and discovered?
One thing that I noticed pretty quickly was that hashtags don't exist on Bluesky (though I've seen some screenshots to suggest this feature is 'coming soon', edit: we have them now). I would post some of my nudes, though, and get followed by random people and I didn't know how they were even discovering my page, especially if my recent post hadn't yet been reblogged by any of my followers!
Instead of hashtags, Bluesky has a featured called "feeds." When you sign up an account, they'll suggest a few feeds for you to discover, themed around various topics. I followed a few feeds with names like: Science, Astronomy, Developers, and Fungi Friends.
I don't know how feeds are created, but it seems that a developer somewhere had to write some code to create a feed. You don't need to worry about that, though: if you find the feed you can simply follow it/add it to your home timeline and be able to see the posts that the feed has discovered.
[redacted] Here are a few NSFW/adult content-oriented feeds I have found, if you're an exhibitionist like me and want to find your people there:
You may need to go to your "Settings -> Moderation -> Content Filters" to enable adult content if you like to see that stuff. 😈
Sharing a post on Bluesky should be very familiar compared to Twitter or anything else you've used. You can write some text and attach some pictures.
A couple of notable aspects of sharing a post that I want to highlight are:
I highly recommend writing alt texts because: those "Feeds" that help others discover your post will see your alt texts as well. When I wondered how people were discovering my posts without any hashtags, that was how. You don't need to spam a bunch of hashtags in your posts like you did on Twitter, you can just graphically describe what is shown in your pictures and be picked up on the relevant feeds for people who want to see that stuff.
And also: describing nude pictures in writing is just a very fun exercise in itself. 😈
I should also share some of the current lack of features or quirks about Bluesky that you may want to know about here.
Issues like these seem to be on the radar of the Bluesky/AT Protocol developers and may be improved upon in the future. For me personally, they are non-issues: I've always treated my Twitter (etc.) page as fully public, I've rarely ever had to block anybody, and for DMs you have always been better off taking your conversations to proper chat platforms anyway.
I think I should elaborate on that last point: Mastodon has Direct Message support but their web interface is clear that DMs on Mastodon are not secure. They say that because a DM needs to be synced to the other server your friend is on, and your server admins on both sides do have the technical capability to look in their database and read your DMs. New users on Mastodon are surprised about this, but guess what: this has always been the status quo even on centralized sites like Twitter. Whoever runs the server and database has always been able to read your DMs if they so chose to, unless your DMs are explicitly "end-to-end encrypted," which they usually have not been.
I don't know how Bluesky will implement DMs, but they seem to share this concern and (I suspect) they will bring DMs only when they are able to end-to-end encrypt them properly, which is a hard problem to solve for website-based applications, for reasons I won't get into here.
But anyway, if you're one who liked to run a "private" page where almost nobody but your friends can see your posts, etc., I thought it fair to point out how Bluesky currently works in that regard.
Mastodon and ActivityPub more generally are interesting, but I wrote before about some of the pain points and issues I have with it.
The good news is, Bluesky and the AT Protocol address some of the biggest pain points in ways that I find very interesting. In fact, the whole reason that they are developing the AT Protocol to begin with is because they found ActivityPub to have fundamental limitations that were at odds to their vision of how much better an open, federated social network could be.
A couple of examples in particular of the pain points with Mastodon include:
On Mastodon, if you no longer like your current server and want to move, you can "migrate" your account to a new place. However, this doesn't work the way that most people would hope: only your followers are moved over, but not your posts, and not the list of people who you follow.
Migrating to a new Mastodon host is basically like starting over with a fresh new account. The only nice thing that Mastodon migration does for you is to automatically move your followers, so you don't need to tell them about your new profile and they'll update to follow it automatically. Usually. Your mileage may vary with non-Mastodon software and you still might lose some followers in the move.
One of my #1 top favorite features of sites like Tumblr or Twitter was how I could write a bunch of posts over many years, and at any time, somebody who newly discovers my page was able to scroll all the way back on my timeline, if they wanted, and easily see everything I had ever posted before.
On Mastodon, this usually doesn't work very well: following somebody on Mastodon is more like subscribing to their newsletter. Your local server will show you their new posts going forward from the moment you began following them, but chances are very good that your local server does not know about their old posts from before. The only time their older posts may be available, is if your local server already knew about them before (e.g., because somebody else on your server also follows them, and so has been bringing in their posts). This is a fundamental problem with ActivityPub more generally: it is an "inbox/outbox" based protocol and there lacks a standard method to deeply retrieve historical posts from another server.
On Mastodon, it is a common experience that somebody follows you and you visit their profile, and only see maybe a couple of posts, and a notice that says "Older posts from this user are not available, click here to go to their Mastodon server to see their full page." That would be okay, but if that user is primarily NSFW and all their posts are nudity/porn, it becomes very tedious to scroll back through their page: you need to click to reveal every single blurred picture, because you probably don't have a local Mastodon account on their server, so you can't have an "automatically show me NSFW content" setting there. Speaking for me personally, I never dig very deep into somebody's page on Mastodon if I need to put up with all of that.
As I mentioned on my Fediverse pain points post, moderation on Mastodon is handled at the server level: your local server administrator makes decisions about how to moderate content coming from other servers, in ways that can harm their local users if these decisions are not ones that you would agree with. And as an end user, your only recourse then is to migrate your account to some other Mastodon server, run by somebody you like better, or to self-host your own Mastodon server where you get to decide on these things.
In an ideal world, this would be OK: since Mastodon is open source and anybody can run a server, sometimes those servers will be home to terrible people, such as racists or transphobes or general assholes. Your server admin being able to wholesale ban these servers keeps you and the rest of your users safe. But sometimes, server bans are put in for absolutely stupid reasons, personal beef between two server admins, over drama that you don't really care about, and now because a server block was put in place, you are cut off from your friends who had accounts on the other server.
The only way you avoid getting caught as collateral damage in moderator drama like this, is to self-host your own personal server yourself, where you alone get to make these moderator decisions, but that comes with its own helping of downsides: needing to have the technical skills to run a server correctly, not having a local timeline of like-minded users to discover, etc.
Recently, Bluesky has open sourced their Personal Data Server code which allows you to self-host your data on your own machine, instead of hosting it on Bluesky-managed servers. Along with the PDS, you are able to migrate your account from Bluesky's servers onto your own.
Bluesky migrations are full data migrations. They don't just move your followers like Mastodon does, it will deeply migrate all of your data: your complete timeline of posts and their attached images, and everything. This is what Mastodon users hoped for when they saw there was an ability to migrate to other servers when needed, but Mastodon fell far short of user expectations here.
And, Bluesky solves the timeline problem here too. My account is all hosted on the main Bluesky server, but I follow some self-hosting enthusiasts who've already set up their own PDS servers, and I can view their profile page within Bluesky's (bsky.app) web interface, and I can scroll all the way back to the beginning of their timelines if I want to, and I don't have to click to reveal all their NSFW images because I'm viewing them from the server my account is on, where I have opted-in to see adult content without blurring. So again here, Bluesky's style of federation does what I would hope for and expect Mastodon to do, but which Mastodon does not do.
And finally, Bluesky puts moderator decisions in the hands of users where it belongs. Admittedly, moderating 'the entire Internet' is a big job and most people don't really want this responsibility, so Bluesky has "moderator lists" where you can choose to follow somebody else's list if you like theirs. So if you want to keep yourself shielded from terrible people, you can follow somebody's moderation list where they do that job for you. But if they make decisions you don't like, or they cut you off from your friends on accident, you can fix that yourself by changing which lists you follow. You avoid inter-admin drama over silly nonsense you don't care about that way. For a bit more reading, here is a recent Bluesky blog post about moderation.
Identity regards your username or how people discover you in the app.
On Mastodon, your identity is tied closely to the Mastodon server you signed up on. If you signed up on the server "mstdn.social" your Mastodon handle looks like "@yourname@mstdn.social". If I want somebody to follow me on Mastodon, I give them that full identity handle and they paste it into their search bar to bring me up.
The down side comes when I want to migrate to another server: my identity will change! My first Mastodon profile was @redacted@mastodon.social because I signed up on the mastodon.social server. I've migrated a few times since then, which always gave me a new identity. I was able to move (most) of my followers each time, so they didn't really need to care that much, but I did need to update my blog and find/replace all the places I linked to my profile and update to the new location.
On Bluesky, identity is de-coupled from the server you signed up on. They rely on the tried and true Domain Name System for identity. For most Bluesky users, they have names that look like soandso.bsky.social where they have the "bsky.social" domain in their handle. This may be OK for most people who don't own their own custom domain names, but you don't have to have a .bsky.social handle. My handle on Bluesky is my blog's domain name: @kirsle.net. If you have your own domain name, you can use it as your Bluesky handle, and then you never need to worry about changing it, even if you migrated to a different Bluesky server in the future!
And even if you have a .bsky.social handle now: you could keep that handle even if you migrate servers, too. But if you were interested in self-hosting your data, getting your own domain name is the most sure way to make sure you're always in charge of your identity.
Should you check out Bluesky, my profile link is at https://bsky.app/profile/kirsle.net and you can give me a follow.
I think that'll do it for today, until I have any more exciting news about Bluesky (probably when they make further advancements towards allowing open federation and full self-hosting). When the dust settles with all of that, I plan on setting up my own Bluesky servers for myself! 😎
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