Article by Mike Masnick
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system.
This makes me think of my biggest gripe with the social media I use and it’s the lack of feeling safe, and I don’t mean that I want to be sheltered or have content hidden from me. I’m tired of living in the giant melting pot.
Totally agree.
Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.
The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.
To add to this, I think as long as decentralization involves having to know how to and have the money to operate a server, it’s not going to reach the point some may hope for. The monetary costs may be lower than ever, but that doesn’t address the knowledge requirements (not to mention time for setup and upkeep).
Even one of the more user friendly attempts at this so far (AT Protocol) doesn’t address this in a meaningful way, as one still has to get into the weeds of server config, domain leasing, etc.
“Slightly biased”, yeah.
But a very, very credible voice on this subject. Let’s not fall into the easy trap of tribalism.
I dont give a fuck what anyone from bluesky has to say till they make federation open to all without some bs walled garden shit.
the federation is open since febuary 22nd
Really, I swear I saw something the other day claiming otherwise. Ie each instance admin needs to sign a contract or something with bluesky? And hows the account creation is that centralised?
Basically bluesky works with pds’s, that host account data, (i actually host my own), appviews, which manage the post sorting/algorithm and ui, and relays, that sit between the two and make it easier (theyre not strictly necessary, but make At-proto services much faster and more reliable).
Relays are expensive, and so bluesky’s relay is the only real one currently, not because theyre shutting other people out, because a relay is expensive. So currently you kind of have to use bluesky’s servers to use the AT protocol, but thatll change whenever someone has the resources to setup a good relay.
