All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • timconspicuous@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 months ago

          First of all it’s incongruent to talk about “instances” in a Bluesky context, there are no instances, there are PDSes, relays and AppViews.

          Second of all, people have only been starting to self-host these branches of the architecture in the last few months. You could make the same argument about mastodon.social, especially when the service was still in its infancy. Even now that it is more mature, mastodon.social still has an outsized influence over the entire fediverse with Rochko acting as “benevolent dictator for life”.

          There are initiatives to shepherd users away from Bluesky PBC servers like Blacksky, Northsky, Free Our Feeds etc. and Bluesky PBC has not given me any indication that they are trying to hamper these initiatives—they are making small incremental changes towards a more democratized ecosystem all the time, for example just last week they implemented a new atproto account management, that was rolled out for all self-hosters and is by default free of Bluesky branding.

          edit: to make my point more clear, yes, obviously Bluesky could be more democratized, but given how young the service is, it’s being held to an impossible and ever-shifting standard and also I can’t stand how people here baselessly insinuate that any non-flat hierarchies are somehow a nefarious plot by Bluesky PBC to “federation-wash” their product.