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.
I will add one more thing to this, to make it maybe a bit more clear: the question is who has agency over what.
In Fediverse, communities large and small can set up their instances and have full agency over moderation decisions, registrations, blocking, defederation. They can build and maintain their garden while allowing people in and out as they choose.
In BlueSky, that kind of agency is gone. The storage/hosting layer is irrelevant — the idea is that you can move your account and content anywhere else with exactly same access to everything else retained, so that’s not where moderation decisions can happen.
The “search and discoverability” layer, on the other hand, is where “providers” reign supreme. And they are incentivised to slurp as much data as possible to “offer a better service”, and are not as closely connected to specific communities or people. The power dynamics are completely different.
This de-coupling of storage/hosting and search/discoverability is billed as a great advantage, but it’s not an advantage for the users — it’s an advantage for the providers.
In fedi there is no single entity that can have full visibility into the whole network. In BlueSky, that kind of visibility for “search and discoverability” providers is the basic assumption the protocol is built on.
And let’s not even start delving into the question of consent here… 🙄
I will add one more thing to this, to make it maybe a bit more clear: the question is who has agency over what.
In Fediverse, communities large and small can set up their instances and have full agency over moderation decisions, registrations, blocking, defederation. They can build and maintain their garden while allowing people in and out as they choose.
In BlueSky, that kind of agency is gone. The storage/hosting layer is irrelevant — the idea is that you can move your account and content anywhere else with exactly same access to everything else retained, so that’s not where moderation decisions can happen.
The “search and discoverability” layer, on the other hand, is where “providers” reign supreme. And they are incentivised to slurp as much data as possible to “offer a better service”, and are not as closely connected to specific communities or people. The power dynamics are completely different.
This de-coupling of storage/hosting and search/discoverability is billed as a great advantage, but it’s not an advantage for the users — it’s an advantage for the providers.
In fedi there is no single entity that can have full visibility into the whole network. In BlueSky, that kind of visibility for “search and discoverability” providers is the basic assumption the protocol is built on.
And let’s not even start delving into the question of consent here… 🙄