Jack Dorsey, Twitter's former CEO and founder launched his own social media platform today, called Bluesky. Bluesky is based on the principle of allowing users to build a shared and open social media platform.
@rysiek first of all I don’t see any problems in Twitter technically. It worked well for long time and only now with Musk as CEO we see that not only architecture matters but people supporting it also.
Regarding BS: just take a look at how centralized fediverse is in reality. Eugene just happened to be always talking about mastodon instead of fediverse, everyone is trying to register on mastodon.social when they herd of it first time. I mean they whole fediverse for people right now is only what a man with a German company did.
And yet when somebody forks Mastodon (like GlitchSoc or Hometown), they are not beholden to Eugene. Moving between instances works. Moving between forks works. Yes, Mastodon has an outsized presence in fedi, but it has nowhere near as much control as Google Search has over website traffic, or as the biggest BS’s “search and discoverability layer” provider will have over BlueSky’s users.
Fedi is simply a different architecture on a very basic level, built in a way that is not as supportive of economies of scale and “winner-takes-all” model, as BlueSky is.
Would I want fedi to be more diverse in instance software offerings? Totally. Is it fair to compare this to secondary centralization that BlueSky will support by design? Absolutely not.
Once again it’s not technicality but also people who support it matters. We can take at-protocol and do many integrations by our own to create own high level crystallization. Or we can give up on current AP and move on to the next one some time. The more ideas you give to the world the more it gives back.
Differences in protocol design define what will happen in a network run on it. Differences in design between BlueSky’s protocol and ActivityPub mean that secondary centralization will be way, way easier in BlueSky than it is on fedi — to a point that it seems this is by design.
If they are to make their own evil corp then you and I are allowed not to be it’s customers.
How’s that working for us all regarding Google Search? We’re not even paying Google for search and yet we cannot escape it. I use DuckDuckGo daily, and yet I still am sometimes forced to use Google Search. Websites that want any real traffic need to optimize for Google Search.
“Voting with your feet” is a naïve myth unless the underlying system actually empowers people to do it effectively. Fedi does. BlueSky very definitely does not in the layer that matters.
Decentralization is about community and people
Totally. No wonder, then, that BlueSky’s design carves out a space for secondary centralization exactly where communities and people can be found: search and discoverability.
Check out Mudge’s whistleblowing report:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/13/twitter-whistleblower-mudge-congress/
I read the whole 200+ pages, here are some excerpts that I found the most damning:
https://rys.io/static/TwitterWhistleblowerRevelationsExcerpts.html
And yet when somebody forks Mastodon (like GlitchSoc or Hometown), they are not beholden to Eugene. Moving between instances works. Moving between forks works. Yes, Mastodon has an outsized presence in fedi, but it has nowhere near as much control as Google Search has over website traffic, or as the biggest BS’s “search and discoverability layer” provider will have over BlueSky’s users.
Fedi is simply a different architecture on a very basic level, built in a way that is not as supportive of economies of scale and “winner-takes-all” model, as BlueSky is.
Would I want fedi to be more diverse in instance software offerings? Totally. Is it fair to compare this to secondary centralization that BlueSky will support by design? Absolutely not.
Differences in protocol design define what will happen in a network run on it. Differences in design between BlueSky’s protocol and ActivityPub mean that secondary centralization will be way, way easier in BlueSky than it is on fedi — to a point that it seems this is by design.
How’s that working for us all regarding Google Search? We’re not even paying Google for search and yet we cannot escape it. I use DuckDuckGo daily, and yet I still am sometimes forced to use Google Search. Websites that want any real traffic need to optimize for Google Search.
“Voting with your feet” is a naïve myth unless the underlying system actually empowers people to do it effectively. Fedi does. BlueSky very definitely does not in the layer that matters.
Totally. No wonder, then, that BlueSky’s design carves out a space for secondary centralization exactly where communities and people can be found: search and discoverability.