You have become the very thing you swore to destroy
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If it was BlueSky forcing sign in, I would agree. But this is giving the user control of their own posts. I don’t really see a problem with it tbh.
Yep. It was a feature people kept on shouting at the devs that they needed. The devs kept trying to explain how an open protocol works and that everything they post is open. But no one seemed to get it so they just added this feature with the caveat it only works for people using the Bluesky PBC’s app and website.
It does not give users “control”, its an illusion to think that something posted on the internet can be controlled. The only reason this exists is to get people to register an account. Thats it.
There are valid reasons to restrict the visibility of your content to registered users.
I post nudes on a certain site, where I have the ability to choose who can see my pictures. The options are: everyone, friends, registered users, and VIP members (paid subscription). Nearly all of my pictures are set to be visible only to registered users, with the spicier ones restricted to VIP members. My reason for this has nothing to do with trying to force people to create an account, let alone pay for a subscription. I have no illusions about my content being completely safe from outsiders. I simply want to create a small amount of friction to prevent complete randoms from easily accessing my content when they have no personal investment in the site. I see putting myself out there as the price I pay for free access to everyone else’s profiles. If you want to see my pictures, I expect you to do the same. I’m taking the risk of potentially being recognized - I expect you to take that risk too.
TL;DR: It’s convenient for selling porn, and paid posts in general
That’s pretty dishonest summary of what I said. Nobody is selling anything here.
I don’t think this is entirely accurate. I understand what you’re saying, that a determined person can relatively easily bypass this hurdle and view the content.
Still, I can see value in creating a hurdle. It’s not unsurpassable, but it requires energy to pass it. And sometimes that’s enough to not be the low hanging fruit. Maybe the poster wants to avoid trolls, or they don’t want that particular content to be easily scraped.
I mean that’s why it’s “mildly infuriating”, it doesn’t enrage me as much as Twitter requiring a sign in for the whole site.
Fair point :-)
Yeah, if that’s the person making the choice, that’s a good thing
Technically, all posts are public by design. This “sign-in required” is just a flag on the post asking clients “please don’t show me to everyone,” and app developers could ignore it.
Mastodon has followers-only posts, too, you know?
Wouldn’t that be unsearchable for non followers? I never played with the feature
that’s what quiet public is; it removes it from discovery and global feeds.
Could it just be any post that is ‘friends only’ or if the user has blocked anyone?
Sounds like it’s not systemic like Twitter or Reddit requiring logins for virtually anything.
They require login for all “sensitive” posts, so yes it is a systemic issue. For anyone annoyed by this, just use LibRedirect and enable forwarding of BlueSky to the 3rd party web client https://skyview.social/
Good to know, thanks!
twitter is fucked and requires a login for everything, but reddit seems to work fine without a login.
Unless you’re on a vpn, in which case the whole site is restricted unless you sign in.
twitter is fucked and requires a login for everything,
They will show you a login screen at the home page. However. You can view specific tweets without an account. You can also view some content from a user.
You’re crippled important ways in that as far as I know, you can’t sort by reverse date order (to see a user’s recent tweets, which is kind of important), and AFAIK you can’t search, but you’re not completely blocked out.
Here’s Michael Kofman’s tweets:
And here’s a specific tweet of his:
https://x.com/KofmanMichael/status/1627309427907854336
Both should be visible without a Twitter account.
EDIT: Oh, interesting. It looks like he is either mirroring (dunno if he’s still updating the Twitter account) or has moved to Bluesky anyway, though. Hadn’t noticed that before now. Glad I looked. Had kind of stopped viewing his stuff when Twitter clamped down.
Twitter’s even worse than that. Sometimes they require login to view a tweet. Sometimes you can see every post on an account. Sometimes there are certain posts missing in a timeline but you can’t know without logging in.
Ridiculously annoying.
Anything that’s marked NSFW requires a login on Reddit.
You can bypass that by just replacing “www.reddit.com” with “old.reddit.com”, which shows exactly the same content using the old Reddit UI without login. It has no more restriction than just clicking an “I am over 18” button.
e.g.:
I can’t fathom how people have been using the redesign in the first place. Old.reddit was the only way.
I never moved to the new UI. I assume that users using the new UI is a combination of:
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Many, probably most of the existing userbase came in after the redesign – Reddit kept growing. Probably not even aware of it.
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A lot of users – especially today, though not back when the site was created – are browsing the site using a smartphone, and the old UI, while usable, is not designed around a small smartphone screen. (That’s a two-edged sword; to some extent, I think that the new UI is poorly suited to a personal computer.) That being said, Reddit, like many Web-based services, pushes hard to get mobile users on the official app – more access to a user’s phone and data-harvesting potential, I suppose – and I’d guess that a lot of smartphone users use the official app these days, rather than the mobile Web UI. I think that Reddit mostly sees the mobile Web UI as a way to help lower the bar to feed new users in, but that’s not where they want mobile users long-term.
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Reddit added inline images to the new UI, but not the old.
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There is a small amount of incompatibility…I’d have to go back and look it up, but IIRC backslash-URL-escaping for URLs has slightly different edge cases, so you can get a link that works in the old UI but not the new and vice versa.
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You really need a browser extension to fix up links to redirect to the old UI, since otherwise links that users on the new UI use will just direct old users to the new UI.
We actually kind of have a similar problem on the Threadiverse too – while we can use
!community@instancesyntax to link to a community and have the user stay on their home instance, today we have no way to link to a comment or post and do so – if I paste a link to it, it’ll take a user off their home instance. There’s a Firefox addon, Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin, which sticks a button in the sidebar of webpages to view a given post through your own home instance, which is kind of a half-solution.
On the other side of the balance sheet, I haven’t played with the new UI enough to know what didn’t make it over, but I don’t know if the subreddit wikis – each subreddit came bundled with a wiki – ever made it over. They weren’t accessible from the new UI when it came out.
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pretty sure thats just on mobile, could be wrong tho
The mobile website doesn’t let you view NSFW-flagged subreddits without using the Reddit app – you can’t view them in a browser at all, by default, login or no. You can bypass that by flipping your web browser to request desktop mode and viewing old.reddit.com too.
The owner of an account can set individual posts or their entire account to be visible only to signed-in sessions. I see it used by certain artists that moved from twitter, and consider it an overall good feature.
Yeah I don’t see it as a problem when the users control access to their own posts.
It’s when they require a sign in to see anything, it’s a problem.
This was added when they opened up to the public as a compromise to users. You can set it per account in privacy proof settings (I personally do it so anti trans people can’t scrape my posts)
Apps implementing the API don’t always have to follow it, though. (They even say this when you set the option)
whats wrong with it? i mean its up to the author if they want to make them exclusive to signed in users
Not the OP, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I do think it’s a little odd given that the security is at the client and not in the protocol. As others have mentioned already, if you use skyview.social, you can see the posts anyway.
oh then i guess useless feature for now
Just because a post had a special client side flag set doesn’t mean i want to honor it. Let me see the post without logging in ffs.
me fr:
Bluesky is on the way to become darksky
I’m not saying Bluesky sucks, but this is childish.
Bluesky was started by the same guy who started Twitter, and is only federated in concept.
It was never meant to be “Twitter but better”. It was always meant to be “How can we make the most money off fleeing twitter users?”. There’s a lot of overlap between the money making and being better, but it’s incidental to the real goal. Any claims otherwise are pure marketing.
Bluesky was started by the same guy who started Twitter, and is only federated in concept.
He didn’t really start Bluesky; he started the exploring the Bluesky protocol as a research initiative while at Twitter to try and explore how to make Twitter decentralized. Jay Graber was hired as the CEO and incorporated it as an independent company.
