(Also, I'd add, with the increasing influx from ex-Twitter, the mean ideology is moving more toward thr centre. Though again, the *mean* is left of centre, IMHO - which should be unsurprising, given ex-Twitter's shift to the far right)

I can't even tell your goal in this conversation. You claimed that you have to subscribe to the owner's ideology to use Bluesky, which makes no sense when *the owner never talks about ideology at all*.

I'd say most *users* are on the left, and that might mean that a conservative feels they're outnumbered in an argument, or get blocked a lot. And Bluesky's moderation is based on labels, and users can choose to subscribe to whatever labelers they want to block whatever type of content they want, so if that person is posting a ton of stuff most people don't want to see, they won't see it because they said to filter it out. But this has nothing to do with "the owner's views", let alone some sort of ideological demands from the owner. And conservatives are perfectly welcome to do the opposite, e.g. label liberal content and block it, gang up on liberals, block them, etc. The only thing that'll lead to actual attempts to block you from the network is if you're trying to hack or DoS it or whatnot.

And just to be clear: the server in that URL is an *AppView*. Appviews do not host the data (beyond caching). That DID points to the location of the PDS where the data can be found. There are 3rd party PDSs, entirely independent of Bluesky's internal PDSs, and they work just fine. To the point that about a week ago a network outage left Bluesky's PDSs inaccessible, and for a short period of time, 3rd party PDS users had the whole network to themselves. ;)

Let's go a step further. Let's take a random Bluesky URL, like this image:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_...

Without any context, let's ask Claude to analyze the last part of that URL:

Explain this portion of a URL, in detail:

did:plc:txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou/bafkreibkrboyklokmhs2od4npw36vwfivmh7qaxhipwqpqx64oq3ttonum@jpeg

Claude's response:

Let me break down this URL portion:

did:plc:txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou - This is a DID (Decentralized Identifier)
did is the scheme
plc is likely the method (possibly related to Bluesky's AT Protocol/PLC)
txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou is the method-specific identifier
/ - Standard path separator
bafkreibkrboyklokmhs2od4npw36vwfivmh7qaxhipwqpqx64oq3ttonum - This appears to be a IPFS CID (Content Identifier)
The bafk prefix indicates this is likely a CIDv1 in base32 encoding
This type of identifier is content-addressed, meaning it's derived from the content itself
@jpeg - File type indicator
Specifies that this resource is a JPEG image
This URL structure is commonly used in decentralized systems, particularly those that combine DID-based identity systems with content-addressed storage systems like IPFS. The format suggests this is likely from the Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem, where such identifiers are used to reference user content and media.

I'll repeat: Bluesky's content is addressed by ***distributed identifiers*** based on ***IPLD***, so that the content can be found regardless of what physical server it's on.

I've been on Bluesky for over a year, and I still don't know what Jay's "political philosophy" is, and nor do I care. She never talks politics. If you want a CEO obsessed with US politics, go to Twitter.

They're not even saying that. They're only saying that *they* won't do it or facilitate it.

(Not that they have the resources to do so anyway - it's a small team with a small budget)

ATProto is a fully open protocol. All the data in the network can be downloaded. It's not even hard - just run an ATProto relay, and every PDS will push all their data at you in realtime.

They're looking into ways to try to add protocol-level privacy, but it's nontrivial due to the distributed architecture. But I suspect they'll get it eventually.

I have *literally written a script to read from the firehose*. It *is* friggin IPLD. Archives are CARs. Storage is binary DAG-CBOR. Binaries are referenced by CID. The backend *IS* built on IPLD. For God's sake, try it for yourself. I could send you a CAR of my account right now if you want. You don't even need to mess with ATProto to do so. Literally, just open a Bluesky account, go to "Settings", then "Export My Data", then "Download CAR file", then look at it. *It's IPLD*.

Has the 2026 midterms campaign kicked off yet?

If that's what you want? If you're looking for somewhere to torment you with stuff you don't want to see, then no, Bluesky isn't for you.

Well, actually, I take that back, you could deliberately add feeds you don't like to torment yourself if you wanted. What you can't do is force your torment on others.

And how exactly does your DID point to it, in a distributed way?

It's straight from IPLD, the underlying P2P tech behind IPFS. A lot of the underlying tech is (note: ATProto doesn't use IPFS itself, just IPLD). Most of the devs have P2P backgrounds.

Because it's not distributed in the current implementation. In fact, pretty much every distributed thing is all "we'll figure this out later."

Can you people please stop inventing falsehoods to get mad at? Life is so much better if you don't invent your own misery.

Dorsey started a chat room for people to share ideas, provided seed money to the winning RFP (Jay's), and held one board seat for a while, before leaving (his board seat was taken by Techdirt's Mike Masnick). He's not even on the site (he quickly found that most people there don't like him ;) ). Bluesky is majority owned by, and run by, Jay Graber, who was also the lead designer.

All the news mentions Dorsey because everyone's heard of him. But he was basically just a contest-hoster. He wanted to spur the creation of a distributed protocol that Twitter could then adopt, to try to "de-silo-ize" Twitter. Thankfully, Jay negotiated to have Bluesky be an independent public benefit corporation rather than to exist within Twitter - otherwise, it would have been immediately killed off by Elon.

But you get the same negative reaction to situations where there wasn't a true deadline, just an estimate of how long the work would take, and even if the reason for missing the estimate is that the requirements changed three times after the estimate was made.