Post

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

I find this intriguing because I'm a HUGE "A.i." hater, but I don't even think attie is the worst example out there - as I understand it, it's a feed creator, not a content scraper/thief. But it's "A.i.," so it's potentially contributing to the environmental/economic issues we've seen... AND...

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

...since it's "A.i.," I think it's justifiable to suspicious of mission creep and additional "A.i." crap to follow that DOES scrape and steal data and contribute to disinfo and bullshit. It was also AGGRESSIVELY marketed as "A.i." - down to the domain name - to a platform of users that HATE "A.i."

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

Maybe the product will work fine. But it ALSO feels like a situation where tech overlords are pushing "A.i." onto something that doesn't need it. If feeds are so hard to create, why not just... make a better, more intuitive feed creator with better UI?

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

I also suspect a big part of the backlash is that dedicated users have a long list of features that we've been requesting for years now - and this was absolutely not on that list. (The ability to make accounts private is the most important unrealized feature. I know it's hard! But it's key.)

7 reposts141 likes

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

Last thought: I think they also dug their grave here by creating an account for this thing with a cutesy name, so many people no doubt assumed it would be an LLM bot account and blocked it for that reason alone.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I made sure to also block Jay, in case they thought I was of the mistaken belief that blocking attie would keep the AI from reading my posts or something.

Greg Pak
@gregpak.net

A developer who works with Bluesky said a year or a year and a half ago that it was doable. I'm not tech savvy enough to judge independently, but I've been going off of that statement. 🤷

Aditya Mukerjee 🦦 🏳️‍🌈
@chimeracoder.bsky.social

yeah, that would be cool to have and AFAIK unique from a product perspective (ignoring Google+ Circles)! though what I've seen a lot of is folks asking for a way to limit visibility to quickly limit harassment campaigns - which Twitter has, and is a reasonable request, but unlikely to work here

Aditya Mukerjee 🦦 🏳️‍🌈
@chimeracoder.bsky.social

based on my understanding of AT, I would be *extremely* skeptical of that statement unless I heard Bluesky themselves release a statement that they're planning on doing it. AT is designed in a way that doesn't provide much wiggle room here. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Aditya Mukerjee 🦦 🏳️‍🌈@chimeracoder.bsky.social

DMs have nothing to do with the feasibility of private accounts (especially the ability to take an existing account and posts private, a la Twitter, which is what most people who have been asking about this say they want)

Aditya Mukerjee 🦦 🏳️‍🌈
@chimeracoder.bsky.social

if folks wanted "private-only" accounts - ie, an account that's created in private mode and is functionally just DMing their posts to a specified set of users, that would be possible to hack into it, but when people say "private accounts" they're usually talking about something similar to Twitter

jess m. ☕🍂
@jametc.bsky.social

Well they've managed DMs? I think everyone understands these are not Signal level encrypted private communications lol we just want a bit of surface level control, that's all we want!!