— I do not believe, not even for one second, that Blueksy is billionaire proof. Bluesky has accepted investor money which makes them susceptible to a hostile takeover in some form and, thus far, it’s not a decentralised platform.
I’ve been looking for a piece that critically examines Bluesky’s corporate structure, the people behind their investment rounds and how both might affect Bluesky’s future. “Without Sky: Social Media and the End of Reality” is a pretty good start.
For several reasons, Bluesky has a target painted on its back. First, it has no plausible revenue model that can make it self-supporting anytime soon. Second, it is facing large and quickly-growing costs as it seeks to scale and fend off adversarial attacks. Third, it has attracted a fairly homogeneous audience of exhausted, well-meaning liberals that would be tempting to target for manipulation. And crucially, it already has a board member who has a fiduciary duty to serve a variety of crypto-related interests.
With the most recent investment from Blockchain Capital and Blockchain Capital’s Kinjal Shah subsequently joining Bluesky’s board comes the necessity to make money, at least at some point. If the returns don’t materialise, investors will try to recoup their investments another way; therefore opening the plausible possibility of a billionaire take-over.
If that takeover happened today, there would be no alternative. The AT Protocol allows for decentralisation, but only on paper. There is only one Bluesky instance.
Bluesky is effectively evolving as a centralized service. Until or unless there is a second company or concern competing with Bluesky using the same protocols and able to somehow fund its operations, it is effectively operating as a clone of Twitter, but with a very selective audience, and similar cost structures.
— Final Words shows deleted posts from Bluesky in a never-ending stream. According to creator phil, it “listens for all delete events from the firehose, and then shows the just-deleted text one last time in an anonymized disappearing feed.“
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
By definition, a federated service is one the is part of network of independent services that interact for a greater good. Call your proprietary network protocol “open” and “decentralised” all day long, but if you allow only one instance to use the protocol you have a closed system. Mastodon is federated, Bluesky is not.
I doubt Bluesky will ever be federated. The AT protocol was never more than a marketing gimmick to fit the Zeitgeist during Twitter’s meltdown; to position Bluesky as a viable alternative. Bluesky is on a Twitter’s beaten path. The “open” protocol will be locked down as soon as the service attracted a critical mass of users big enough for VCs to monetise. Bluesky will end up as a walled garden, like Facebook, or Twitter.
Wednesday, 07 February 2024
— After a year in private beta, Bluesky will be opening for the public this week. Anyone can sign up, invite codes are not required any longer. If you loved Twitter before Musk, you’ll love Bluesky. If Twitter did your head in, then you won’t love Bluesky. It’s the same concept, same design, same people, and same mundane content. The underlying, decentralised technology is different but I doubt anyone but us nerds actually care about that.
Tuesday, 02 May 2023
— Ryan Broderick joined Bluesky, the latest greatest Twitter alternative, and recapitulates the events he witnessed within 24 hours of signing up:
Yesterday, in the span of a few hours, Bluesky had its first “main character” moment and its first high-profile bullying incident. Two big milestones for any social network. The “main character” moment came after users discovered that dril’s username was reserved on the app, which meant he couldn’t get an account. A sex worker on the app said she was happy dril couldn’t join Bluesky because he had backed the #BlockTheBlue campaign on Twitter, which she believed was hurting the livelihoods of sex workers, the logic being that sex workers needed Twitter Blue to promote their services. Everyone dunked on her for a while and then moved on. A few hours later, after dril and a bunch of other high-profile Twitter users like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had moved over to Bluesky, blogger Matthew Yglesias announced he had joined, as well. And then a bunch of users threatened to kill him with hammers until he announced he was taking a break from the app. User have not threatened to beat Jake Tapper to death, for what it’s worth.
Sounds fun. I think I will channel my age-appropriate inertia and wait this one out; sticking to blogs.
If we want more people to enjoy what we believe are the benefits of something like Mastodon, it’s on us to make it delicious and convenient and multi-textured and fun instead of trying to shame people into eating their soysage and unsalted soup.
I hope all of that is actually possible for Mastodon, because a lot of great people very much want it to become a more welcoming place. But the longer Mastodon stays in Linux-on-the-desktop mode, the more likely those people are to take their energy somewhere where it’s valued.