Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
17 comments
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This article is all you need to read to understand why bluesky will just be another shitstain in the history of social media.
Let’s back up. How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform?
Its still not (in any practical way) and never will be.
How do you plan to make money?
Subscriptions are coming soon. [...] Other apps in the ecosystem are experimenting with sponsored posts and things like that. I think ads eventually, in some form, work their way in, but we’re not going to do ads the way traditional social apps did. We’ll let people experiment and see what comes out of it.
As literally everyone with a brain expected. This is also why there will never be unrestricted federation because it would threaten their profit model.
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https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c
Now that dozens of people are hosting their own relays and we have third-party AppViews, the first posts are being made to Bluesky without using any of Bluesky PBC's architecture, but sure it's not decentralized and will never happen or whatever.
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I dont think you understand how and why decentralization works. Its about democratization of digital platforms and that requires a power hierarchy that is as flat as possible (in terms of AT Protocol instances).
To achieve this bluesky.social would have to close registrations and push people to other instances. Unless you have a roughly equal user distribution between at least 4-5 instances that are completely independent in terms of financing, governance and location, there will never be a bluesky that is resistant to enshittification.
Basically as long as any decision that bluesky.social makes is considered absolute law, all existing federation has zero effect.
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Which of these commercial platforms did not ever plot for that?
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lol
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Archive link: https://archive.ph/N8QBu
Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky?
This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you’re not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can’t find it, you can build it. You don’t get this level of control anywhere else.
Emphasis added on last sentence. If nothing else tells you an interview is as much marketing as it is aiming to be genuinely informative, it should be statements like this.
That last sentence is basically a lie, as anyone across ActivityPub networks can tell you. I would say I don't know why they would say this, but I do know at least one reason: marketing.
It can be argued ActivityPub doesn't enable the same level of control, but the problem is that it's so damn flexible that it'd be somewhat disingenuous to do so.
AuthTransfer has similar problems but of a different sort, primarily that too many people not using it don't realize how it's still rapidly changing and that already there are some independent and semi-independent platforms emerging built with it.
What remains important to keep an eye out for is if/when the AuthTransfer protocol is fully released from Bluesky's ownership/control and becomes an open standard. I think that's as important or more important than any fully independent "instance", to put it in ActivityPub terms, built with it.
17 comments