Bluesky

0:00 Currently there's a lot of new users in Blue Sky. Two months ago they had 200 people in the network. And then basically they had a lot of invites which were not used. And suddenly, just in the last few weeks, a lot of people have been actually using them. And obviously they've also been giving new ones out. And now there's 50,000 people in the network. And you can see that they're starting to have a little bit of issues with moderation. The tools are not in place. There are some health threats. And yeah, it's getting out of hand in a way. But I guess it's positive that there's... Well, people are interested of decentralized networks and competition is good.

0:54 It seems to be that there's a lot of creatives coming in. And there's a lot of people who are interested in the network at this point. So if you want to catch some Hollywood writers or directors, now is a good time to join. In a way, you can say that this is a reset. You have a chance for... Well, it's a tiny window. But you have a chance to get your presence to be known for some of these luminaries who have a lot of followers in the other networks. And suddenly they are in a position where they might only have like a 50. And if you reply or you do something, you may get their attention. And in a way, this is a fresh start for some people. But this doesn't obviously last too long.

1:44 But I think it's great that young people or those who missed the previous waves now have a chance as well to recreate their networks, build them again or reshape them in a new format. This one is from Farcast, 16th of September 2021, when they had a first time 100 daily active users. And I think now they have between 10 and 20K altogether users. So networks are taking different times to do things. But obviously, as Blue Sky, Farcast is also invite-only, so they have a regulating valve how quickly they want to turn the knob. What do you think caused the Blue Sky invite inflection? I haven't followed closely enough to have anything definite.

2:34 But I have one story for you. I don't remember anymore when LinkedIn was founded even. But I do remember when it actually hit in Finland. That was one weekend. When Basilola, a local entrepreneur, was sick. He was having a flu, nothing serious. But he was bored. He was bored out of his mind. Well, that's what I think at least. And he started to send out invites to LinkedIn to his friends. And he was well connected. And lo and behold, after that weekend, more or less everyone who was everyone or anyone in the tech scene was already in LinkedIn. So that's how it happened. It happened because of a flu. So maybe that's the case with Blue Sky as well.

3:25 Somebody was just bored out of their mind or they wanted to escape a bird site or a combination of all these things. Once upon a time, there was a rich man who owned a media platform that requested access to a public, decentralized media platform. But there was a problem. There was 50,000 people already in. But they didn't have any invite. Why the corporates are going to Blue Sky? Well, first of all, I think they need a place to go. The APIs are really closing down now in Twitter. So they cannot use it for either posting their stories anymore automatically or with their publishing systems.

4:14 Another thing is the same happens also with the DL. So they cannot use the customer service anymore. So they clearly need some place to reach out to their customers and also tell their audience that there's some new stuff to read. Then the other thing is that if you ask where to go, well, you could go to Mastodon, but it's a bit awkward. You could set up your own server. But yeah, Blue Sky has a Twitter feel and look. So you can also use your own domain as a verification. And obviously, you could also put up your own server. And in that way, have your own instance and maybe extend your offering for your readers as well and put up paywall or whatnot in the future.

5:05 So it has all of these appeals. And if you ask where else to go, not too many obvious answers, Noste maybe. But I think it feels a bit too radical for the corporate folks. This is an interesting twist in a decentralized protocol, especially with the corporate employees and those who are getting a lot of followers due to their job. Noste founder just dropped an article where he's pointing out that Blue Sky isn't really a protocol in a sense that it's not open. A lot of things are centralized. There's only one instance. There's a lot of good points in there. I wouldn't call it a scam.

5:53 But having open AI as an example going out all good and for the benefit of people, whatnot, open source, and then close it up. In this case, yeah, you can say, and I think that's what they believe, they start with this instance and doing it this way. But when are they going to open it up? When is that moment? There's never going to be a perfect moment. And the longer you wait, the harder it is to build something. This is the same thing that's happening with Noste at the moment. Some of the clients are building centralized backends. There are a few big relays, nodes at the moment, which pretty much everyone is using. So it's becoming centralized de facto even though it's open.

6:45 But it's just more convenient. And this is the way it's going to tilt the further along it goes. So the idealism fades away through decentralization. It never happens because it's not built upon from the beginning. And the inconvenience and imperfectness of building the hard way from the decentralization up never happens. I think if anything, Blue Sky was more like a philosophical cry for help. Like it was a noble intention. Maybe it's a means of encouragement to get the ball rolling and to display demand for this type of thing from Twitter, from the administration of Twitter.

7:36 But it's just kind of the wrong way to do things. When it comes to really getting a good result. It might have encouraged other people like me and Fiat Jaf and stuff to take a shot at it. So it was successful in that sense. But it failed in the sense that you don't start with funding and then work on a protocol. You start with a protocol and then you get funding for it. If you are expecting to come up with the hard part after the hard part, after you get funding, then of course it's not going to go well most of the time. Quite a moonshot. So it's just common sense. You know, I mean, this is not something that money can buy. If money could buy these decentralized protocols, then billions of dollars that's been funneled into the space would have gotten us somewhere.

8:33 But it's created mostly garbage. So I don't think money is going to be what does this. It's going to acquire some blood, sweat and tears. True cypherpunk ethos. And even then, we'll see. The real challenge is making these protocols costly to attack. Especially the part where you're trying to discover honest nodes. Because if you go to discover nodes and it's just a bunch of Sybil nodes, then you're in trouble, you know. And if creating a bunch of Sybil nodes is easy, or requires trusting a third party to find nodes, then you're in trouble, you know. And I don't think Blue Sky creates any cost when it comes to discovering these aggregator nodes.

9:23 I don't know. They're very vague about the whole thing. And it's just very... I will restrain from commenting on it further. But in terms of Noster, like, you know, they rely on the mutual relay model. So I just find a friend and see the relays he's connected to. And if I trust him and he's found some good relays, then it's all good, you know. It just doesn't scale very far, but it works for now. So I think Noster definitely has the leg up here. And hopefully there will be better ways to discover nodes in the future that are extremely costly to attack and scale far better. Once we have that and ways to store large files and stuff, I think we're going to be off to the races.

10:13 This is for some historians to check and verify, but I think that's how it is with protocols. They start with a few people who are maybe outliers in some sense, and it's messy in the beginning, and then it catches up. But you cannot, like you said, you cannot put it with money. Has it ever worked that way? Has it ever been the case that you can just buy your way to the protocol? And if you buy your way to the protocol, it's already twisted in the sense that, well, aren't you asking for some kind of payback? You need to return the money somehow, or you have some ideas how you want to go about it. There's only pretty much like the founding of Bitcoin, not too many of these completely selfless, acts of putting up great stuff, which actually catches up.

11:08 The other thing is that if you truly want to have it decentralized at scale, or an in scale, it needs to be so easy to do that it's basically part of every client, the whole thing. But can you actually build this type of a monolith from the beginning? Because the value chain will build up. There will always be middlemen. There will always be these aggregators. There will always be these ones. These are the weak points. And through decentralization, peer-to-peer kind of worked to a point, until it didn't. And then now we have hosting and AWSs and whatnot. So the file sharing didn't catch up. CI is another take on the same thing. But how to solve this is that we don't really need anyone, anything which is in the middle, and make it so unattractive to that middle party to build up their position.

12:10 I think that's what's required. So it needs to be so decentralized from the beginning that it's already game lost. This response by Rappel, who is Twitter co-founder and been building decentralized networks for a long time, and also knows the Blue Sky team and is friends with them. Check it out. I will, in the next chit, elaborate a bit more. This is an intro if you want to check out what's been happening before. It also mentions the Rappel's article I posted previously. This is a good state of the North Star and Blue Sky in 60 minutes, or 30 minutes if you do it in 2X. It summarizes the weak points and what's going to happen or what can happen in the future.

12:57 And why this is happening. Why things are as they are at this point. Rappel points out that at the moment, Blue Sky, which is the company holding the client and holding the keys, physically the keys as well, because that may be news for someone, but not your keys, not your data. They are only one pair of keys, and those are by the Blue Sky, which is signing all the messages. So you cannot really at this point take your keys and go away. It's not possible. So it is, in a way, similar to the Signal, even though you have Signal and you can copy the code and run your own things, but you cannot interoperate with the other Signal instances, or actually with the official ones.

13:50 So what do you do with the protocol? Is it a protocol if you cannot actually play with other people? You're just like an isolated island which doesn't communicate with anyone. This is the state of Blue Sky at this point. He calls this as a cathedral model, where there is one single entity, team of people, maybe one person like in Mastodon's case, who controls the building of the infrastructure and ecosystem. You can even ask whether it's an ecosystem, if there's some single point of failure or choke point in a way that you have to appeal to someone, lobby them to do something, hope that they actually will come through to their promises.

14:41 Is that a protocol and can you build it later on? He also mentions that when is a good time to do anything? When is a good time to step back? I mentioned earlier on that I don't think there's a protocol, but I think there's a good time to do something. And it's getting harder and harder to further your goal along the development process. The opposite view of a cathedral model is a bazaar model, where nobody is in control, you have only soft influence. If you don't like something, you can build it anyways. But usually it's better that you try to get some other people also to cooperate with you, so you have more appeal to the market, then you have a better product, what the other people can also use, and hopefully also that other people will see what you've been building, because if it's not a protocol, at least it's not standardized, if it's not working properly for everyone, those who are building, creating, writing something, and those who are reading it.

15:42 So that's why the soft influence is so important, and that's why it's so chaotic, that's why it's also fun. And he mentions, the fun point, that the crazy stuff is happening in Nosta, because you can, you can build fun stuff, and people love fun stuff, and that's sort of part of the appeal. You just don't do the boring backend, and documentation and whatnot, which doesn't appeal to the end user, you can put some crazy stuff on it, and make it really appealing, and worth your while, even though it may not be, the most important thing from all together. But the biggest takeaway, I think is that, it's not about the people, because Rappel is saying that, the people are awesome, who are building Blue Sky.

16:39 They've been handpicked, they've been doing this for a long time, they know exactly what they're doing, they knew what they were getting, and they're getting into, so it's not about their intentions, it's not that they are against the vision, what Nosta is, for example, building. The common goal is the same. He doesn't even believe that, the persons are trying to build something, which is a business for the Blue Sky. So it's not about that. But I think the real point is that, the structure you have, is very important. If you have a strong, wrong structure, in a sense that it's not aligned with the, common goals, the public goals, the public domain goals, it's really hard to do it right.

17:38 Blue Sky was called off-card, in a sense that, they wanted to do this in their offices, without too much attention, and build it properly. But yet, the invites went out, and somehow it just exploded, in a sense, I think there's now 70K people in the network, and they just released as well, that no heads of state, so they don't want to get certain type of, attention at this point. Yet, can you build it? And when is the right time, to release it to the world? If you are, in incentivizing, builders, who are seeing all the, buzz, who are not part of the, core loop, of the decisions, which are now made, about the protocol, and the future of the ecosystem.

18:39 The protocol capture, is a real danger. And it's a real risk, meaning that, it will just be a one nice instance. And, it was also mentioned in the video, that, people really want just a Twitter clone. They just want to have it like a Twitter, and, just yesterday, I thought I was retweeting something, but it actually, was risk eating. So I was actually doing it in blue sky, even I was just confused with the, interfaces, they look the same. And, those people may not, care about, protocols, and all the fancy stuff underneath. They just want to do the same thing, over and over again. And, that's absolutely fine. But, the builders at this point, and some other people may have, more deeper ideas, and way to, save the future, that we are not repeating all the web 2, 2.0, mistakes.

19:38 And, it seems to be that Noste might be a, better chance for this. Having, funding questions, building blue sky at this moment, being overwhelmed by the demand, by the, a lot of people there having, attacks, by trolls, and, needs to build, moderation, and all these things, coming with, running an instance, distracts. And, then the appeal comes that, should we take this, or not, that should we take a little bit more money? Should we, just try to keep this all afloat? And, because the structure, is not done in a way, Rubble, shows a document, when blue sky was, they were discussing about blue sky, that how it should be structured, and he suggested that there should be a foundation, responsible of the code.

20:33 And then, a, private company, running an instance, having the business model, of itself, but it's just one of the many, or like an example of the, possibilities, to be built upon the protocol. Because this didn't happen, this conflict, remains, and, it's up to the people, to keep the integrity, and, sounds to me that it's, harder to do the split, if there ever will be a split, the further along you go. David asked, Rubble, has there been in the history, some successful cases where, a, top down, build of a, protocol, is successful?

21:24 And he gave some answers, and I don't want to spoil them for you, check them out in the video. But, the outcome is that, it doesn't build an ecosystem. Yeah, they can remain, they can still be, sustained, but for other reasons. So this outlook doesn't, look too promising, for Blue Sky at this point. Maybe a time to check Gnoster. If you don't like any particular decentralized network, you can always, build your own, or pick something, which is up and coming, like Spritely and DSNP. But yet, it's really hard to break it to the, masses. This Twitter co-founder's article, describes pretty nicely, what's needed for the new digital communities, but also the early days, when everything is, cool and dandy, but then, things take a, little bit more, serious turn, like in a Blue Skies, case, what happened just, a few weeks ago.

22:24 Here's a, post, how Blue Sky goes about, blocking. And, Rabl, the co-founder of, Twitter, who is also building on Gnoster, and very familiar with, Blue Sky, and be working also, with the Blue Sky team, comments, about that, implementation here. This is from Gnoster, his post there. Mostly, it comes to the same conclusion, that Gnoster did. Although, I think, the Gnoster community, doesn't assume most app developers, slash, relay operators, will be, by default, enforcing blocks. So, what I gathered from the article, was that, all the blocks are public, because that's the only way, the, the only way the, the federation will work. But, for the details, check the, the link yourself.

23:13 I clearly has, stopped going there, frequently, Blue Sky, that is. So they, gonna need soon, a account called, MIA, like here. Maybe Diane can do it there as well, or, there's another Diane doing it, I probably will be called out as well. But I noticed that, many other people, have stopped doing, pretty much the same thing, pretty much the same time. So they haven't posted for a long time. Nevertheless, my point was that, the, algorithm for the feeds, is pretty good, feature. You can, pick and choose different types of, ways to, discover content, whether it's only by mentions, follows, or best of your friends, or, anybody can, do those, listings.

24:06 But it, it was a really fun, feature, and it seems to be, nicely executed as well. So, that's probably something to learn for, AirChat and, also for Nosto, and other people, who are building, decentralized services. Blue Sky is already having difficulties of, serving, their webpages, for the opposite reason. Too, too many people, coming in. The same is happening, with Nosto, while there's no, rate limits, and in that way, the service is up and running, happily. But, all the other services are now, getting a lot of traffic, and, even AirChat, is the place to, check out what's happening, because, the usual place is no more.

24:53 While all eyes, have been, focusing on Thread's launch, this week, Blue Sky announced that they have reached, one million downloads, and, obviously, they've been regulating, who can, get into the app, so in that sense, it's not a, fair comparison. Also, some sources, according to some sources, MEDA has, three billion users, so, getting, even as, as of now, 72 million, registered users, is still, a huge achievement, but, in comparison, obviously, it's easier to get, than, the, obviously, it's easier to get them, converting, just, from, existing, user accounts, to, adding one more.

25:40 So, three, out of three billion, well, it's not launched in all the places, yet, so, it's not exactly three billion, and that's, across all the MEDA, accounts, and probably they are, I don't know whether they are even unique, but, nevertheless, US accounts, for the largest number, of Blue Sky, Blue Sky installs, some 40%, then there's Brazil, almost 10%, Japan, 8.5%, Thailand, 7.5%, and the UK, almost, well, 4.6%. I will put a, link to the, article, and, you can check it out yourself. Blue Sky also announced, this week, that they have closed, they, eight million seed round, and, there are some, familiar names, companies, like, automatic, and, you know, companies like, automatic, ex, PM, from Twitter, and, people from, RedBlood, RedHat, so, it's, probably, interesting to see, also, who are, backing, Blue Sky, and believe in it, and, obviously, automatic, is interesting, in the sense that they are, having, the, one, company, and, quarter of, block space, publishing platforms, under the, umbrella, namely, WordPress, and, Tumblr, for example, so, they are integrating to the decentralized, web, as we speak.

27:17 That was not all the news, from Blue Sky, they also now announcing, partnership with Namecheap, so they will offer, customers' domain, so if you wanna have your own domain name, linking to, your, Blue Sky profile, you could already, now do it, if you have a custom domain, but you need to, do the DNS thing yourself, now they doing, it for you, but you have to pay for that, I don't know what's the price, but, nevertheless, they are trying to get, more commercial, but they claim that, the advertising model, is not the way to go, so, that's interesting to see, how, this plays out. Blue Sky, is a, well, it's a, Blue Sky has exceeded a 1 million milestone on posted authors. Altogether they have 1.7 million users at this point and 70 posts is the mean count.

28:16 There are already 72 million total posts and it's good to keep in mind that Blue Sky is still invite-only. What is the rule of thumb in social media? The rule of thumb in social media is that there's 99 lurkers and one poster, or the more sophisticated version of the same. 90 lurkers, 9 little posters and one big poster. But this hasn't been the case with Blue Sky. Rose from the Blue Sky team tells that in the early days the poster lurker ratio was 90:10. So the upside down.

29:05 90 posters per 10 lurkers and that's per 100. And now they are approaching 56:44. Still more posters than lurkers. So Blue Sky is growing up and it's approaching the traditional social media, but very slowly and still the ratio is upside down. What is the best way to get a good customer experience? There are already third party clients for Blue Sky and Grey Sky just launched a few days ago. And it is a really nice client. I recommend to check it out. You can have your custom feeds.

29:52 And this makes the experience much more fun. And it's a lot of fun to have a good experience. It also has a lot of other features which are still lacking in the official app. Musteron hasn't fared as well, even though they had the best opportunity from the alternative media to Twitter last year when Elon Musk took over Twitter. And a lot of people were starting to look for alternatives. But they came and then they went. And this has been a lot of fun. And I think that's the best way to get a good customer experience. And this has been a bit what had been happening also with Blue Sky. But for some reason, Musteron users haven't really sticked. So the retention rate is low. And I posted the Blue Sky stats some time ago. And there was a little bit of a discussion why is that happening.

30:43 And if you're interested of the details, check out the thread. It should be open for everyone to read. From the Twitter alternatives, just to have a little bit of a comparison. And I think that's the reason why I'm here.