Did you know Twitter has an open-source arm? This is what it's been up to

After several years of work, Twitter's open-source offshoot Bluesky has published some code and more information about what it's doing – but not a new social network yet. Just weeks after Elon Musk made moves to buy its parent company, and more than a year after it was discussed before Congress, the Twitter subsidiary has …

[steelpillow]

The holy grail of online presence

I wouldn't mind an independent financial account that won't disappear if some particular bank or cryptocurrency implodes. These days cash is just data, a number in a database somewhere. An equally non-volatile online ID would just be a bonus.

[jake]

What a brilliant idea. I wonder why nobody's thought of it before.

"Independent accounts, which can be used across multiple separate, federated, social networks, but which don't rely on any single hosting site. An account which can survive the disappearance of the server, or service, that it originated from."

They could call it Independently Relocatable Contacts, or IRC for short :-)

[Andy Non]

email address as ID

I changed one of my email addresses recently which necessitated updating various website and organisations. It was surprising to discover that a couple of them had no facility to change email address as they used it as the primary identifier for accounts. "But nobody changes their email address!" responded one organisation.

[gv]

Re: email address as ID

There's also the interesting issue of disparate accounts using the same email address and it not necessarily being the same person.

[ortunk]

Re: email address as ID

We have a catch-all [e-mail] everyone uses it when they register somewhere, probably tied to multiple handles by now

[Barry Rueger]

Re: email address as ID

Or American corporations that refuse to accept the mandated phone number in any format but (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

Or demand a State/Province.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: email address as ID

Or postcodes/zip codes that can't contain letters or spaces (mine contains both).

[Andy Non]

Re: email address as ID

I had that once when registering with an American site. It was supposed to be international and allowed you to select your country, but there was a mandatory field that insisted on a valid American zip code being entered. Duh.

[42656e4d203239]

Re: email address as ID

People of a certain age will remember that, for a memorable ZIP code, 90210 is your friend.... who doesn't want a place in Beverly HIlls?

/mine is the one with an old copy of the TV Times in the pocket ---->

[Tom 7]

Re: email address as ID

I had BB and email address with a small ISP that was bought up and they put up prices so I left them and was cut off immediately. The number of sites that insisting on sending email confirmations to my old email address that I had to somehow acknowledge before I could change made The Scream look like a holiday photo.

[thejoelr]

Code release before project killed.

It seems like this project has been going forever, and is only now pushing out more than talk. The timing is curious. Get this out into the wild before Musk axes the project to fix twitter's financials? Likely. This is not a profit generator.

[Tom 7]

Re: Code release before project killed.

Chaff? Here's some code we've either just about to or have stopped using for you to plough through while we attack you from another vector.

[Pascal Monett]

"An account which can survive the disappearance of the server, or service, that it originated from"

Great idea. I have just one question : who is paying for the maintenance of the account ?

Whether you signed up for free or have a paid hosting account, this new idea supposes that BluSky is going to be dealing with the survivability of said account.

With what money ?

Because that's what it always boils down to.

How is BluSky going to fund maintaining all those free logins ? They are free, nobody is going to pay to maintain them.

I think BluSky is going into PieSky territory.

[bofh1961]

"An account which can survive the disappearance of the server, or service, that it originated from"

I agree - if there was money to be made from such a service, Google would've been touting it some time ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

A first analysis by a Mastodon dev

Here is a first analysis of the Bluesky code by one of the Mastodon developers.

Make sure to read the comments too if you wish to see more detail, particularly about the challenges around decentralisation vs one guaranteed identity across all instances.

[F0ulRaven]

Love what's being discussed by the technical people - but as soon as the blue haired biology haters delve into it, the only thing on their mind is how do you use this to moderate nazis to death - and that isn't how this works!

However, working out how to combine a real life ID with an online avatar, in the same way as a biological person and a legal version of that person can co-exist, is the real challenge of web 3.0 - and this is a great start!

[Rob Davis]

maildev.com desktop tools help email migration and archiving (no affiliation)

Check it out. Awesome. Visual tool for building the migration you need - to move all your email and folder hierarchy to another email provider.

Also does archiving - each email as a file, folder structure retained. Can define file name title in custom format e.g. email title, sender, receiver, date. Handles titles with same name. Handles attachments - separate folder etc.

Very comprehensive tool.

No affiliation, incentive or referral to me.