alt.hn

3/30/2026 at 7:37:45 PM

I'm betting on ATProto

 https://brittanyellich.com/atproto/

by speckx

3/31/2026 at 1:32:43 AM

> 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.

by apitman

3/31/2026 at 11:09:32 AM

> 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.

by dethos

3/31/2026 at 12:32:43 PM

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.

by prox

3/31/2026 at 7:38:04 PM

> 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.

by WorldMaker

3/31/2026 at 3:15:22 AM

> 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.

by davidw

3/31/2026 at 12:19:44 PM

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/>

by teddyh

3/31/2026 at 3:32:35 PM

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.

by davidw

3/31/2026 at 1:24:43 PM

Bingo. The Internet turns the other person into an abstraction.

by mmstghjx

3/31/2026 at 10:20:53 AM

> "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.

by sph

3/31/2026 at 7:47:56 AM

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).

by marak830

3/31/2026 at 1:27:42 PM

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.

by mmstghjx

3/31/2026 at 11:00:45 AM

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.

by elorant

3/31/2026 at 12:13:49 PM

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.

by parasti

3/31/2026 at 3:43:59 PM

This feels right. I think stronger differentiation between the big and the small is important. There's room for a "big everywhere thing," and I think ATProto is probably the wrong way to do it; as I've said elsewhere, ATProto's most important feature ("take it with you") is potentially its greatest weakness and danger.

AKA, if ATProto takes off as a big thing, you've made surveillance and data gathering by Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER.

by jrm4

3/31/2026 at 10:57:43 AM

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.

by iamkonstantin

3/31/2026 at 8:25:32 PM

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.

by pythonaut_16

3/31/2026 at 4:21:41 PM

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.

by solarkraft

3/31/2026 at 2:28:57 AM

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.

by pastel8739

3/31/2026 at 2:31:20 AM

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.

by conception

3/31/2026 at 12:23:47 PM

[Crab] silence, brand

by teddyh

3/31/2026 at 3:44:56 AM

> If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix

Please! No more!

by jonway

3/31/2026 at 4:55:20 AM

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.

by runarberg

3/31/2026 at 12:53:53 PM

No brand wants real interaction with their customer base. They want feel good anecdotes and memes.

by BoredPositron

3/31/2026 at 2:40:10 AM

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.

by ajsnigrutin

3/31/2026 at 11:30:49 AM

> 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.

by zimpenfish

3/31/2026 at 10:43:49 AM

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.

by pjc50

3/31/2026 at 3:54:16 AM

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

by skybrian

3/31/2026 at 9:47:01 AM

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.

by rmoriz

3/31/2026 at 10:29:50 AM

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.

by sph

3/31/2026 at 10:37:26 AM

for what I have seen Bluesky is not less toxic than twitter.

by poulpy123

3/31/2026 at 8:22:17 PM

It resembles Truth Social more than Twitter, but the opposite side.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 1:42:59 AM

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.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 1:57:08 AM

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.

by packetlost

3/31/2026 at 2:00:42 AM

For real, trust online is an open and hard problem. It's only going to get harder with ai bots running amok.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 3:13:13 AM

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

by packetlost

3/31/2026 at 3:52:16 AM

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.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 8:43:28 AM

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.

by jauntywundrkind

3/31/2026 at 9:39:02 AM

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

by razingeden

3/31/2026 at 8:26:20 PM

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%

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 6:46:43 PM

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?)

by jauntywundrkind

3/31/2026 at 8:59:36 AM

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

by austinjp

3/31/2026 at 9:45:14 AM

> 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.

by rmoriz

3/31/2026 at 1:40:30 AM

How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?

For example:

A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]

Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]

And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]

I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)

by garethsprice

3/31/2026 at 2:50:42 AM

I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems.

I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.

I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.

Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.

by foxylad

3/31/2026 at 2:54:40 AM

Username checks out for fedi user ;)

by corndoge

3/31/2026 at 11:30:44 AM

But mastodon has algorithms. (trending feed, news feed, suggested accounts, etc.) Maybe they're just kinda bad or the posts are lacking.

by pxoe

3/31/2026 at 7:51:42 PM

All of them are optional and can be disable at the instance-wide level, in addition to some of them having account level opt outs.

They also are still generally bound to an instance's own horizon: there's no global "trending feed" (and it would be really hard to create one), these optional "algorithmic" tools still differ from instance to instance based on what that instance follows and its trading relationship to its neighbors.

by WorldMaker

3/31/2026 at 2:26:40 AM

> How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?

It doesn't. There is currently no single design that eliminates all the major pathologies at once. Social media harms come from a mix of business incentives, ranking systems, scale, moderation burdens, and power concentration, so fixing one layer does not automatically fix the rest. Recent research on decentralized protocols shows that they aim to redistribute power and user agency, but they also face governance problems and risks of power re-concentrating at key decision points (see the discussion section in [1]).

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2505.22962v1

by ninjagoo

3/31/2026 at 1:46:53 AM

The credible exit allows for real competition. In other words you can own your identity and data, apps store content in your database, and you can swap out apps that enshittify, eg. there are many alternative clients for bluesky data.

The design of feeds (algos) and labellers (moderation) is unique and one of the best parts of the protocol.

There are also interesting applications for inter-app features, a double edged sword, i.e. good for content creators but bad for something like linkedin.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 2:19:00 AM

> The credible exit allows for real competition

This is a mirage. The ATProto providers don't give you the cryptographic keys to your identity, so if they lock down your account, you can't migrate.

by ninjagoo

3/31/2026 at 2:25:10 AM

While it is not the default for good reason (onboarding ux), you can establish your own keys and prevent that lock down.

Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 3:11:46 AM

Looks like you have to give this 3rd party website your username as well as password. Ouch. On top of that, it doesn't work if you've been already locked out.

by ninjagoo

3/31/2026 at 3:33:57 AM

I'm going to cutoff the double posting chain we have been doing. Here's my reply in the other thread we have on this. Tl;dr - there is a CLI option as well that stays local.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582442

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 12:49:41 AM

I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.

But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.

As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.

by manifoldgeo

3/31/2026 at 1:10:47 AM

Re:fediverse - it depends on which communities you're part of. Digital rights, politics here in Canada (see e.g. https://mstdn.ca/@avilewis), politics in the EU (https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/about), basically anything that touches Linux is very much entrenched on the protocol. My local newspaper (https://thetyee.ca/) has a Mastodon share button on the page even. Unlike with Bluesky, leadership has been very consistent and so far trustworthy.

by pojntfx

3/31/2026 at 4:03:50 AM

Which fediverse leaders do you mean?

by skybrian

3/31/2026 at 1:51:04 AM

I could be wrong, but I hold the opinion that ATProto is the CDMA (3GPP2) of social media protocols, while ActivityPub is GSM (3GPP).

CDMA had better radio tech than GSM, but at the expense of openness. Qualcomm basically owned CDMA, and still does, while GSM was cross-licensed among everyone.

Likewise, ActivityPub is truly open while ATProto is "open" but you're basically a prisoner to Bluesky Social, the way CDMA put you in Qualcomm's prison.

Bluesky has the initial lead, but it's Twitter's estranged child. People used to Twitter find Bluesky an easier replacement. CDMA was also an easier upgrade from analog 1G networks than GSM was, due to re-using the back office systems and ESN identifiers.

Yes, Bluesky has a better experience. But maybe future ActivityPub releases will catch up for a large part. UMTS caught up to CDMA while being more open, and LTE became the universal 4G standard, with GSM-centric IMEI and SIM cards and such. And maybe PDS implementations will converge to ActivityPub with an ATProto fallback.

Keep in mind that I know nothing about the protocols, so I could be missing what makes ATProto a better tech, or not.

by neelc

3/31/2026 at 4:05:17 AM

There are alternate implementations of the whole Bluesky stack, though they don't have many users yet.

by skybrian

3/31/2026 at 11:32:37 AM

> Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024.

To be fair, given Mozilla's recent record, I'd take that as a positive sign of the Fediverse's potential.

(Nope, not forgiven them for fucking up and closing Pocket. Never will.)

by zimpenfish

3/31/2026 at 1:12:26 AM

The Fediverse did take off. Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos and realized how much better and reliable (non-profit or not) corporate censors are.

by esbranson

3/31/2026 at 1:53:18 AM

>Then large numbers of influential people got banned by randos

Given the state of other social media. The randos were right to ban them probably.

by officeplant

3/31/2026 at 2:09:10 AM

How can you be banned from the fediverse?

by gzread

3/31/2026 at 3:00:43 AM

I understand your pedantic point but let me give a realistic reply. If your account, or the account of somebody you like corresponding with, happens to be on an instance that falls into disfavour (not uncommon in my time there) then server bans come out and conversations become broken, even between parties who had no knowledge of the overarching drama. Good luck even understanding it if you aren’t a techie.

by thombles

3/31/2026 at 9:49:58 AM

Every server admin can ban your account. You can’t move a banned account. You lose everything. I was banned from mastodon.social because I dare to criticize the socialist regime of the former GDR on Germany‘s Independence Day.

by rmoriz

3/31/2026 at 1:51:34 AM

Banned for what?

by BugsJustFindMe

3/31/2026 at 3:32:22 AM

For selecting the wrong instance when you created your account. "Defederated", effectively the same thing.

by 3689023

3/31/2026 at 1:13:30 AM

...for them.

by egypturnash

3/31/2026 at 2:08:29 AM

FYI the activitypub RFC won't actually help you. What you have to do is copy how Mastodon actually communicates with other copies of itself. If you base your work on the RFC, it won't actually communicate with Mastodon or with all the other software that pretends to be Mastodon.

by gzread

3/31/2026 at 1:23:13 PM

What incompatibilities do you know about?

by 8organicbits

3/31/2026 at 1:04:40 AM

I think realistically the only people who care about this are a very niche number of hardcore users. I won't be surprised if federated networks never take off. Obviously there are good reasons for normies to care but when the solution is as disjointed as some of the federated stuff has been, it's just not an advantage. You end up with a bunch of idealists/nerds chatting about the same stuff. It's not terrible but the average person does not care. I mean arguably the average person doesn't really post on social media, either. Sometimes I wonder if future generations will consider this all hot air.

Really, they're kind of unncessary to begin with, you probably do want an off-ramp but it's better if a centralized service just has good governance and policies that can be affected by users. The current setup is still usually relatively closed entities that are federated.

Regarding the awareness of it in the mainstream, I somehow got too high at a local pot shop and ended up chatting with the cashier. He was a former gamedev and knew what quaternions were (we were both confused by them), but I felt deep shame when I mentioned IRC and he clearly had never heard of it. I don't think outside of HN and other niches, people have heard or care about these federated protocols. It's a very nerdy/self-indulgent need to worry about whether all of your Internet writings are accessible via various means.

by troosevelt

3/30/2026 at 10:26:56 PM

Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.

by hresvelgr

3/30/2026 at 11:25:09 PM

> The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically.

Which sub-communities are on Twitter right now?

by phoronixrly

3/31/2026 at 1:06:19 AM

There are a lot of small, informal and fuzzy communities around specific interests in Twitter. For example, I routinely run into the same folks talking about some specific areas in PL/FP or in complex systems/resilience engineering. These sub-communities aren't clearly delineated like a subreddit, rather they arise organically through the same set of people following each other or, at least, consistently appearing in each others' feeds and conversations.

by tikhonj

3/30/2026 at 11:44:18 PM

It seems like most of Japan.

by throwaway85825

3/31/2026 at 12:22:05 AM

Japanese is the second most used language on Bluesky

https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 7:32:31 PM

But the en:ja ratio is like 5:1. Real population ratio between us:jp is like 3:1, and on Twitter it's more like 1.5:1 by active user count. This means Bluesky is less popular in Japan than it is in English speaking regions.

by numpad0

3/31/2026 at 8:19:35 PM

yes, and... would be more appropriate than "but"

Our points are not mutually exclusive. Thanks for adding more insight. Is your bsky ratio based on actual users or the data at the link? (which is posts by language) Are there similar content stats for the site formerly known as Twitter?

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 8:16:57 AM

Japanese Bluesky isn't even close to Twitter yet. No politicians, no actors and actresses, no seiyuu, no utaite, a few mangaka and light novel authors, nobody that talks about trains, though there is the Frieren official account. There's a few Japanese that are just trying to generally meet new people or some that use Blueksy as a 1 way venting valve.

And as usual there are some political Japanese. In fact given how small Japanese Bluesky is the amount of politics is quite shocking given that Japanese tend not to be as vocal about politics on microblogging sites. (2ch on the other hand...)

by Karrot_Kream

3/31/2026 at 8:38:22 PM

Bluesky itself is just a politics magnet.

by ronsor

3/31/2026 at 12:59:00 AM

Is the same algorithmic connectivity with Japanese happening on Bluesky as it is on Twitter, or are Bluesky's algorithms just as opaque as Twitter's?

by esbranson

3/31/2026 at 1:04:12 AM

I'm not sure myself, however in atproto you can fetch all the data and do analytics, love it or hate it.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 12:31:08 AM

Utaite. Will find barely any anywhere else. Thankfully if you're in one of those sub-communities, you don't ever get recommended anything political or American.

by acheong08

3/31/2026 at 9:51:32 AM

- agentic coding developers - micro startup founders - meme lords

by rmoriz

3/31/2026 at 12:30:33 AM

Discord is my goto choice for communities now, but I fear that company is not on a great trajectory either. It's like voting, you're picking for the least evil

by verdverm

3/30/2026 at 11:45:34 PM

[flagged]

by skrtskrt

3/31/2026 at 2:50:48 AM

I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.

by CobrastanJorji

3/31/2026 at 3:56:50 AM

The people doing the building seem pretty positive, but on Bluesky there are some pretty vocal complainers who apparently hate everything.

by skybrian

3/31/2026 at 4:08:40 AM

One of the reasons I stopped hanging out in the "atmosphere" (the name for the broader, community driven ecosystem) is that I was personally attacked three times. The last straw was one of the leadership team jumping down my throat because I used the phrase "marketplace of ideas" that apparently triggered this individual.

It's not all pleasant. For me, I have a 3rd time's the charm rule I typically follow. Others may have more or less tolerance for this sort of thing.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 3:22:24 AM

I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem.

In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.

Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.

by bjt

3/31/2026 at 3:59:49 AM

The Bluesky API's are much more open than the Twitter API's ever were. There are people building alternate implementations of the entire stack. The alternatives don't have many users (maybe a few hundred to a few thousand), but the infrastructure is pretty far along.

by skybrian

3/31/2026 at 4:02:17 AM

About the same number as would fork an open source project.

So not very many. But the possibility of doing so is invaluable.

by jimbokun

3/31/2026 at 4:11:05 AM

The phrase "hard fork" has come up before in the ecosystem, and outside of it with others who've stepped back and watch to see how things unfold.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 1:50:17 AM

Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board?

Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?

> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.

How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?

by rchaud

3/31/2026 at 2:19:16 AM

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

This article does a good job of explaining some nuanced differences. Tl;dr - ATProto (public data) can be viewed as a distributed event bus that anyone can plug-n-play into. It's a good design imo

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 12:07:56 AM

I've realized not to bet on any social media.

For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.

While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.

You never know what is going to happen.

by CqtGLRGcukpy

3/31/2026 at 12:50:33 AM

if you are always looking for new 'audiences' it's probably just media and not social media. I use hubs my peers and friends use. IRC, email and for the boomers - Facebook.

by calvinmorrison

3/31/2026 at 11:00:40 AM

I'm betting on domain names, HTML and email.

by rambambram

3/31/2026 at 11:31:17 AM

Yes, but we need to decentralize DNS first!

And that means making closed port 53 illegal on your home fiber... good luck!

Also need to open port 25 outgoing on that same fiber.

And we all need routers that run dd-wrt, the problem is all routers that support dd-wrt are sold out because support always comes late in the production cycle.

It's hard work to self host, but it's the only work worth doing.

by bullen

3/31/2026 at 9:53:14 AM

Will it ever be fully decentralised though? I don't consider it that with a company holding key parts.

And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.

by wolvoleo

3/31/2026 at 1:18:28 AM

I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.

by tolerance

3/31/2026 at 1:51:29 AM

fyi, Bain Capital (private equity) now has a say in where things go. Technically since April of last year, but we are now just finding out because they withheld their $100M "funding"

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 2:04:20 AM

ahem, Bain Capital "Crypto", to be exact. Among others.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b

Did not know that Bloomberg was into VC now.

by tolerance

3/31/2026 at 2:05:55 AM

Bain Capital subsidiaries are still Bain Capital. Crypto makes it even less appealing imo.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 10:42:29 AM

Maybe it's because I watched The Expanse too many times, I'm kinda attracted by their concept of COMM system.

Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call).

When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.

The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text).

How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it.

I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected.

Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.

by nirui

3/31/2026 at 10:47:31 AM

> the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.

People younger than me may want to read up on UUCP/NNTP/Fidonet systems, which did this. Ideal if you don't have FTL communications, or are just limited to a really slow phone line.

> People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc.

Yes, exactly. There's this odd cognitive dissonance because people who make social networks are really into the process of "making a social network", but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and usually as part of a "community", however that ends up being defined.

> Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well

Yes - and those are not new. A certain segment of people are optimistic/privileged enough to not believe the problems are real until it's too late.

by pjc50

3/31/2026 at 3:27:47 AM

> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology.

I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.

Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.

by davidw

3/31/2026 at 1:47:40 AM

I think I just need to be less online, I've kind of lost hope.

by gregjw

3/31/2026 at 3:51:57 AM

The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid, which is by far the best discussion on the internet for me, and other than that some discord servers for games I play.

Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.

by zhivota

3/31/2026 at 3:57:44 AM

I tend to agree, I’ve been thinking a lot over the years that this is the way we get out of this mess - lots and lots of smaller independently owned forums that splinter off onto small communities instead of monolithic single-identity mechanisms like social media & to some extent the fediverse.

> The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid

Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?

by jordwest

3/31/2026 at 4:05:51 AM

Nothing is accessible to non members. It's only $5/mo and the fee is explicitly to filter out people who don't care enough about the subject matter to pay a nominal fee.

I found it because someone I followed in my Twitter days hated how nasty conversations inevitably got there, and wanted a place to have in depth, non-ephemeral conversation with like minded people.

These days you'd probably discover it via X where they still post, or their Substack.

by zhivota

3/30/2026 at 8:43:54 PM

I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them.

This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.

by verdverm

3/30/2026 at 11:44:21 PM

> This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.

Can you list protocol level mistakes made by ATProto?

by chokolad

3/31/2026 at 12:17:25 AM

Permissioned data is probably the most fundamental, the part I looked most deeply into myself. People want privacy over blasting everything out to the internet for anyone to scrape. The public by default forced upon users is a bad choice. The purported benefits never materialized. Many of the atmo developers have this belief they can skip the network effects, grift the data and social graph for their own use.

Here's the User Intent proposal that is super easy to implement, yet they have been sitting on it since: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3617 This would have been at least a middle ground to permissioned data, as would have been personal private data (bsky prefs generalized).

After that money, which I see as less of a protocol thing. A protocol or platform has to enable the people to make way more money than itself, at least 10x. (1) Bluesky should have created subscriptions for their service, they wouldn't have needed the private equity had they. (2) Bluesky did more to block others making money than enable it. Graze was in talks with them to enable the creators using their feed system to make money, until Bluesky walked away. (3) Permissioned data would unlock monetization without blockchain.

Permissioned data is being worked on, but the commentary from Bluesky is not promising. (1) Nobody in ATProto has built a permission system (that I'm aware of) (2) Bluesky are proposing a very simplistic system. This will put burden on app developers and create opposition the credible exit philosophy.

Record history / editing. The former should be at the protocol level, the later on feature that is highly desired, possible today, but they resist with fervor.

Bluesky could have put way more funding into the ecosystem, especially in hindsight with the $100M they picked up just after peak. Now they are struggling and stepping on that ecosystem, re: replacing Graze instead of supporting and integrating them with their latest "ai" stunt.

Compare this to Hytale and what they are doing. Night and day.

The Bluesky team has also made several PR mistakes, upsetting their base, they are really tone deaf. Hope the waffles are tasty!

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 12:34:34 AM

The PLC comes up a lot, and I understand the criticism, but it is also good enough for now and on the right trajectory, though the pace could be better, hut like much of the Bluesky development it has molasses in winter vibes. Long-term, multiple identity authorities can exist. Something like Handshake would have been ideal, another great project doomed by poor leadership.

Supporting delete is a good decision in my opinion, and likely a legal requirement. I also like that ATProto stuck a balance between decentralized and user experience. Properly federated systems are unlikely to appeal to the masses, re: blockchain.

Two other well designed parts of ATProto are how the algos and moderation work. Modular, composable, and anyone can participate. This would change with a properly permissioned protocol (zanzibar + macaroons imo) and encourage smaller social instead of big social.

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 1:44:33 AM

[flagged]

by pfraze

3/31/2026 at 1:54:23 AM

[dead]

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 2:11:52 AM

Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.

The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.

The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.

The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

by ninjagoo

3/31/2026 at 3:33:00 AM

This is also my take and I feel like we've seen this play out enough times to see where it's going. The protocol seems to allow decentralization, but that hasn't happened enough to protect against enshitification. If bsky decided to disconnect their main instance from the others, most bsky users wouldn't even notice, but third-party instances would likely implode.

The happy developer relations is to encourage people to develop on top of this "open" platform, but it's hard to imagine that's not just growth hacking.

Why not build on top of protocols that are actually open and will still have decentralized usage in a decade?

by 8organicbits

3/31/2026 at 2:28:08 AM

> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 2:47:04 AM

> Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate

Unfortunately, doesn't work if you're already locked out ...

And, you have to give this 3rd party site your username and password. Ouch.

by ninjagoo

3/31/2026 at 3:32:46 AM

You can use `goat` for a CLI version: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lj7jmt2ct72r

I'm not sure if OAuth gives access to the account management APIs. Certainly much could be improved. Nudging users would be a good notification within the Bluesky app, like one of those on boarding task lists that doesn't have to be completed to get started, but remains visible until you complete or discard them.

goat has since moved to a dedicated repository: https://github.com/bluesky-social/goat

There is also an adversarial path (when the PDS will not play nice), but it requires setting up a rotation key and having a repo backup ahead of time.

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migrat...

by verdverm

3/31/2026 at 4:00:04 PM

Bluesky has all the things that made Twitter a cesspool: a small character limit (300 is still too small) and virality stats (likes/retweets). Its only saving grace right now is that it's itty bitty; if it ever achieved scale it would have the same core problems. Which is to say, if you're betting on ATProto, try a Bluesky w/o those things.

But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.

It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.

by camgunz

3/31/2026 at 3:10:57 AM

> I don’t think any social media platform was designed to do this. But it’s where most of them have ended up.

They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.

by gnarlouse

3/31/2026 at 2:19:52 PM

I don't think protocols are the solution.

Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them.

Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life.

Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.

by nottorp

3/31/2026 at 9:04:37 PM

> Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends?

The feed was added a few years later. Originally, if you wanted to see someone's posts, you had to go to their page and look on their wall (a term I haven't heard in some time).

by fineIllregister

3/31/2026 at 3:00:58 AM

We are still betting on technology to fix society scale problems I see.

by gmerc

3/31/2026 at 9:11:09 AM

To me this looks like betting on using open interoperation to allow people to keep finding systems, moderation, algorithms, tools, and apps that work, that give them control and personal sovereignty over their personal data servers.

I don't think we've had many times where we actually give people a chance. Sure Twitter didn't used to cost $40k a year for API access, but it still had gobs of restrictions on what you could look at and do. It still was Twitter's moderation & feeds.

The whole experience here is up for remake, perpetually. It is the anti-stagnant, the anti-rot that besets all these controlled systems.

by jauntywundrkind

3/31/2026 at 12:22:19 AM

I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of.

Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.

Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.

by busterarm

3/30/2026 at 10:59:41 PM

I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/

by esbranson

3/31/2026 at 1:11:13 PM

Can anyone recommend me aggregators or nice communities from ATProto or ActivityPub?

I'd like to become social online.

by snowpid

3/31/2026 at 3:47:11 AM

I found it easier just to drop social networks entirely.

I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.

by andrewstuart

3/31/2026 at 4:58:00 AM

What does ATProto have that isn’t simply a hermetic barrier against heterodoxy?

You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.

by cmxch

3/31/2026 at 12:21:38 AM

X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.

by charcircuit

3/31/2026 at 12:40:12 AM

It's a nazi website. Before I left they started allowing people to call me the n-word

by blactuary

3/31/2026 at 1:49:29 AM

I recently left also. I saw a noticeable uptick in both these things and it's genuinely been a horrific experience over the last few months and it feels weird to now be on it a lot less.

by gregjw

3/31/2026 at 6:55:15 AM

Pretty bigoted of you to assume there skin color, you should check your privilege.

by akimbostrawman

3/31/2026 at 1:50:35 AM

Wasn't it always allowed? It's very common on https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/

by xdennis

3/31/2026 at 12:43:17 PM

why isn't there a white history month amirite

by blactuary

3/31/2026 at 1:55:49 AM

Come on man.

by AirMax98

3/31/2026 at 12:33:53 AM

Did it? Just checked and my feed is still completely untranslated. I have my settings set as English. I hope they don't do the weird YouTube thing of translating things from languages you know into the language you set. Multilingual people exist

by acheong08

3/31/2026 at 7:39:15 PM

It's only rolling out in past 1-2 days, and also English speaking users are already running low on sanity from being constantly exposed to Japanosphere norms. We'll see how long this experiment is going to last...

by numpad0

3/31/2026 at 12:41:01 AM

The feature only rolled out to me today and I think it started rolling out to people only a couple days ago.

by charcircuit

3/31/2026 at 12:26:32 AM

Absolutely agree, but as technologists our instict is to solve problem as technical, not as social.

by desireco42

3/31/2026 at 8:33:29 PM

Is it the "when all you have is a hammer..." issue?

by verdverm

3/30/2026 at 10:06:46 PM

[dead]

by sieabahlpark