Use social media direct messages to establish a connection on a secure messenger designed for direct messaging, and for nothing else. When people try to initiate conversations with you in DMs, have a ready answer to pivot the conversation elsewhere.

Social platforms like BlueSky have radically different design constraints than direct messaging applications. The implications range from security to social dynamics to legal concerns.

Social DMs are bad. Try not to use them!

Zawinski's Law:

> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

I think nowadays we can substitute email with chat/DM.

Impressed by the rate new features are coming. During the first twitter takeover, many migrated to mastodon in my circles, but it didn't stick. Second wave to bsky has gained enough traction that the circle has sustained there for over half a year, with most disabling their account on X. But a few have remained on X mainly to be able to DM. So this fixes that.

What's lacking for me now is video. Having to share through YouTube and then embed for just small daily clips is a bit cumbersome.

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there.

The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

Jack Dorsey out, plaintext DMs in.

Slow clap for Bluesky.

I really want bsky to succeed. They have a promising product. Users and Content are all that matters now.

I’ll stick to Signal for private communications and publish my public takes with ActivityPub based Mastodon. No need for proprietary stuff anymore.

I have a question that is not relevant to this post. Has anyone tried to implement the Bluesky federated protocol?

I am in the middle of implementing DMs. What are my options for making it e2e encrypted? I am using postgres if that matters.

I'm building a Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon/Farcaster competitor targeted at the average HN reader. Usable but not yet launched. Anyone want to beta test it?

Um...

So all the money, all the development, to create Twitter² and they just added DMs?

That seems an underwhelming achievement.

These people are just gonna re-invent Email next.

Wake me up when the non tech people are using it.

Not only are they not end-to-end encrypted, Bluesky's DMs seem like they're entirely centralized. From their 2024 roadmap:

> We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy.

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap

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reminder for all the twitter haters: Twitter's good!

Yes, I know there's plenty of reasons you'll nitpick twitter and I can nitpick bluesky as well.

More competition is good and I like to see it. Go where your friends are and have a good time.

If you want the edge of Ai/ML, I suggest twitter. Lots of world class accounts. Bluesky is good, has more old school... like 'harry potter' type nerds on it. They post interesting stuff. You should also have a discord. Maybe an insta if you're trying to get a gf

Finally! It was useless without DMs! Unfortunately, there's no E2E.

slightly off-topic but did anyone find a way to still use Twitter/X using Firefox (without disabling strict tracking protection of course)?

Kind of lost interest in blueskys future after they announced they hired twitters former trust and safety lead. Twitter has issues today for sure but that isn’t one aspect I’d like back (eg shadowbanning and lying about shadowbanning etc).

The problem with BlueSky is that they built something specific for Twitter like experiences.

Nostr is much better positioned to take on these large platforms IMO. You can build pretty much any social experience on it.

Here's a selection of things folks have built on top of the protocol: https://www.nostrapps.com

I pretty much haven't heard of Bluesky since it went public. Is it still a mostly cesspool of american politics-obsessed twitter refugees?

Bluesky is going to have the same problem as orkut.

While they’re building out, keeping it exclusive and taking their sweet-ass time, something else will come along and eat their lunch.

I am saying this as a bitter outsider without a Bluesky account but with FOMO.