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by apitman·4mo ago·view on hn ↗
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that

I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.

Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.

If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.

That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.

14 comments
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.

Bingo. Not a big (or even a small) user of social media. But small, focused communities are where I see it bring the most value for the user.

They are also where I've seen the most interesting initiatives since the 90s. The rest is just influential "people" broadcasting their content.

Content and opinions that change like the weather, just for clicks and engagement. It’s a long way from integrity and responsibility from these influencers.
> I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.

Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,

"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."

Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.

I always disliked this take, but I struggled to explain why, until I found this: <https://www.butajape.com/comic/say-it-to-my-face/>
I think that Larry's mostly kidding and it's not really some implied threat of violence in person. Just that we're better at politeness and restraint in person because we see a real human in front of us instead of something abstract on a screen.
Agreed.

We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.

Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).

Real names didn't stop people from being arseholes on Facebook. They did lose a lot of friends, but they also found like minded friends, so kind of a wash.
Bingo. The Internet turns the other person into an abstraction.
> "The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."

Every single day of my life in the past 25 years, whenever I interact with any people online, I have been thinking of this quote:

https://bash-org-archive.com/?4281

This is the ultimate, unsolvable problem of the Internet. In the real world, being an asshat very quickly leads to being punched in the face.

> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.

> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.

I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).

I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.

I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.

If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.

I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.

Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
For real, trust online is an open and hard problem. It's only going to get harder with ai bots running amok.
I have some serious designs for a federated reputation system that is, as far as I can tell, novel but I haven't had time to really refine it and develop a proof of concept. Just a pile of notes for now
Have a look at how labellers work in ATProto. It forms a good foundation imo, perhaps sufficient as they currently stand. Good prior art if we abstract beyond just atproto, not sure what W3C might have already in the works that is similar enough.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

https://roost.tools is another group you may look into. They are broader in scope for Trust & Safety across the internet at large. Their current focus is a couple of OSS tools for builders, but the ambition is big and something to appreciate.

In the old days of the Internet where everyone was pretty much anonymous you were exposed to a reality where anyone could prove you wrong. You spent a few years online you grew accustomed of the idea that there are people there much more knowledgeable than you. It didn’t bother you that much to be wrong because everyone is wrong on something and this shaped your tolerance. You enter the social media now and that tolerance goes out of the window because you can block people, delete their comments and reign supreme in your ignorance.
That's not it. Flame wars are as old as the internet. The quality of discourse has plummeted largely due to these factors: 1) democratization of access to an audience and 2) engagement maximization algorithms. Anyone with a hot take can post it, get people angry fast, at which point the engagement maximization algorithm picks it up and carries it far and wide.
I'm a fan of smaller communities that are semi-open: invite-only, but invites aren't that hard to get. Lobsters works that way. The BlueSky folks are designing "permission spaces" [1] that might be used to build that, though it's a bit early to say.

[1] https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o

This lead to even more strict echo chambers because they effectively kill different opinions. The bubble will become even more strict and radical to people that are not living the cult.
True, but in cultural matters I wish we had more ivory towers and (yikes!) elitist closed communities than watered down open spaces that average out to mediocrity. See niche subreddits when they go popular and devolve into dumb memes and a neverending stream of the same beginner questions.

All the public internet has brought is homogeneization rather than specialization.

while true i think it's inevitable. bots are most of the internet, limiting communities to known good actors is becoming incredibly important and the side effect of removing unknown good actors is difficult to get around
Bluesky/ATProto is (for all that concerns non-developers) a Twitter clone. I think the nostalgia of pre-enschitifed socials is pushing us to try and recreate the experience but I don’t think it would work because it’s not 2010 anymore.

Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.

And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.

I don't see how you can say Bluesky/ATProto is essentially a Twitter clone and turn around and just assume that Mastondon/ActivityPub is not essentailly just a Twitter clone.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
I think your history of social media starts later then mine. My first encounter was with the IRC, talking to strangers was literally the point. I was 12 and had a lot of fun with my friends pretending to be older,

MSN Messenger came later, it was invite only (sorta) but we still found ways to use it to talk to strangers. MySpace was optimized to follow your friends, but almost everybody that used it used it to expand their social network outside of people we knew in the real world (MySpace was amazing btw.) Then came facebook. It went even harder then MySpace in connecting you with your friends, but still almost everybody used it outside their real world friends. Twitter sort of took social media back to the beginning before Messenger and to the IRC in strangers being your primary audience.

I always wondered about this.... in the beginning of instagram, i would follow maybe 30, 40 people, open it 2-3 times per day, and every time there would be 3-5 new photos of random stuff taken by those people (lunch/dinner plates, views from the window, beer glass on the bar, whatever).

Years later, i would follow 200 people, and i would open instagram once per day and all i'd see were random peoples photos and videos (reels? i don't know what they're called anymore), some from international influences, some like stuff that can be found on 9gag, etc. Even if i switched to "following", there would maybe be 1 photo made by a person I actually followed.

Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff? Did people change?

I guess it's even worse now, but i've uninstalled it a few years ago.

> Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff?

Not totally[0] but you'd almost never know it because of all the ads and other junk that Instagram insists you see before the stuff you actually want to see.

(see also YouTube, Facebook, etc.)

[0] although I know a few people who have either limited or stopped posting because they feel there's no point if people don't get to see it. Me, I post for myself (and future historians) and if other people see it, grand.

They really did worsen the ratio on Instagram: firstly, it's one ad per every two posts, secondly at least one of the two non-ad posts will be a "suggested" one unless you sleep those. You can't turn it off permanently, of course.

I do also think the novelty of posting about your life has worn off.

Twitter was amazing, not because of people microblogging about breakfast, but because it gave people/companies/orgs a way to interact directly with their audience. If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix.
[Crab] silence, brand
> If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix

Please! No more!

No brand wants real interaction with their customer base. They want feel good anecdotes and memes.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics

Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.

There's also something about to be said about reposts, which expand the reach by someone else's control. Many a dunk are performed this way and bring on the mob.
Also image sharing being easy. FB is overrun with (maybe real, maybe false) images of Twitter and Reddit posts and and comments. Images also tend to encourage simplistic statements, strawman attack, out of context quotes, etc.
I would separate actual image sharing from screenshots that are more akin to reposts, the later often being the rage bate variety.
I find that this also applies to engagement. I’ve compulsively used Mastodon and this very site, neither of which you would probably claim to be very maliciously designed.
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for what I have seen Bluesky is not less toxic than twitter.
It resembles Truth Social more than Twitter, but the opposite side.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon

I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.

Please commit to your beliefs and sign out, don't come back, if you think that way about social media. Stop proving your point wrong by using social media like hacker news comments, if you think social media so blanketly bad, useless, & ineffective.

IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.

I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.

You must be seeing ants over the fact that you can’t put the parent commenter on some “list” that prevents me from seeing a reasoned and reasonably civil comment that you disagree with.

20,000,000 accounts out of 60,000,000 [0] have already fled Bluesky in despair and will never return to it. Including some of its own creators, like jack Dorsey.

Their technology stack is completely irrelevant because it is botted to death, its user base are aggressive, angry lunatics who drag every single new account through purity tests and struggle sessions. Okay it’s a cool stack, but I wouldn’t go there or read that shit for a million dollars.

When 30% of your accounts delete themselves and never look back, it’s not even a fringe opinion that your sites toxic and not worth engaging with. And no. I’m not going to stop reading HN or participating in a dead IRC chatroom with 10 people in it just because “social media” sites are all , in the balance, equally worthless.

The stuff that gets normalized on Twitter and the stuff that gets normalized on Bluesky both disgust me. The internet is a big place and I have other options. HN is one of the few places left where quite a lot of that is not socially acceptable.

[0] https://clearsky.app

There are not 60M accounts. There are ~43M accounts ever seen

3M have been taken down or deleted

MAU/WAU/DAU ~ 5M/3M/1.5M

It would be closer to say 38M+ accounts have churned for been removed, nearly 90%

I do think I should have the technical means to mark you down, not for a block, but to have a public or private note on file that you seem to have quite the axe to grind. Are uninterested in exploring possible value or upside, that you are anti-exploratory. Are biased to using fear and doubt to deny value, to raise up anti-value. To note, imho, that you cannot present a nuanced discussion on topics. The polemicized warning.

I think social media lacks these abilities to generate meaningful signal and review, and I think atproto begins to open a door to trying new things, to endless human exploration of how we do do the noosphere, how we interlink, after decades of it all being tightly controlled by big companies.

I'm way less interested in bans. I'm very interested in new ways to help us appraise and consider who we are engaging with. The labellers on Bluesky are just a start, are some initial heads-up visibility not to block but to give heads-up visibility into what content we are consuming, giving us great indicators like stechlab-labels offers. We have had so few improvements of visibility across the social sphere and atproto opens the door to networking any manner of content, of which moderation/appraisal is but a part. https://bsky.app/profile/stechlab-labels.bsky.social

There probably are ways to have as bad a time as you are saying on Bluesky. But I don't see that, don't know what you are talking about, and don't see the tensions like that. Yeah, it's social media and yeah people will have all manners of demands and insistences, but in my experience that doesn't have the vitality, isn't popular, and everyone's much more interested in having adult nuanced conversations, in finding multiple perspectives.

And I think largely I'm only semi interested in what Bluesky / atproto is today. I deeply enjoy connecting with amazing people, building incredible open data connected experiences. But I'm so keenly interested in anything that opens the door to enabling grass roots bottom up new social networking systems to spawn and grow and expand. I think most atproto fans would say similar, and I've heard the Bluesky devs themselves say, this protocol is just one go at trying to open the door to giving humanity its own chance outside big tech at building connected social systems.

For now, Atmospheric Computing is by far the best chance humanity has to improve and iterate, as I see it. https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing

(Are you sure you're not looking at number of bots kicked out in those numbers?)

Erm.... you're not exactly proving them wrong are you.