Just some notes for me on Bluesky/decentralisation/Mastodon. Feel free to ignore as there is a lot of discussion out there already.
I have no particular loyalty to a platform or protocol. In an ideal world, Twitter-like platforms wouldn’t exist and we’d publish blogs and respond via email, or at least decouple the original text from its responses.
All this is by the by as very few people blog but they do use social media. I have a Mastodon account because that’s where I’ll find a lot of the people I’m interested in outside of my RSS circle; various leftists, indiewebbers, academics, web workers and folk into weird music, literature and art. I’m under no illusions as to its weaknesses: poor moderation for new users targeted by malicious and bad faith actors, and a UX that isn’t as good as Bluesky’s for starters.
I’m assuming people move from Twitter to Bluesky rather than Mastodon because it’s very similar and easy to get going with. For all its talk of decentralisation, Bluesky offers a single marketplace where you can find fellow Twitter exiles simply by searching for them. Curated starter packs sound popular, and apparently it’s cracked moderation more effectively. I hear talk of an “early Twitter vibe”, but I do wonder how hollow that feels when we know the story’s ending and other, truly decentralised options are available. Apparently Bluesky users are sceptical of a crypto-based startup funded by VC crypto capital – they just want to enjoy it while it lasts. I’ve also read a few people saying they’re preparing for the worst by POSSE-ing.
I suppose that’s reasonable, but not something I really get. Platforms need customers and data to grow and enshittify over time: you may reach a point where you feel you have to bale, but your participation has contributed to that process, while enriching – and maybe empowering (see Twitter and Substack) – whoever’s behind it in the meantime.
The promise of decentralisation appears to offer protection from everything going belly up. However, it is just a promise from what I can tell, and the devil will of course be in the detail. I read that while hosting your account and content on a Personal Data Server is complicated but relatively affordable, hosting a relay – the bit of Bluesky that indexes all the content and pulls out everything relevant to you – requires a minimum of 4TB of storage (and growing), which definitely isn’t. I could have a several-hundred strong Mastodon instance up and running in minutes for $40/month. The technical architecture and its expense will affect just how democratic Twitter alternatives actually are. If Bluesky decentralisation does materialise one can envisage corporations or other organisations with deep pockets setting up Bluesky instances, but not spontaneous collectives or hobbyists.
I feel pretty sure this is a moot point. While Bluesky has a fairly carefully worded, democratic-sounding but essentially meaningless vision of a public good, mutually owned by the people and companies that participate in it
, Blockchain Capital aren’t donating to a not-for-profit, and a vision isn’t governance. Furthermore, VC investors aren’t looking to create a “sustainable” business like, say, Panic or micro.blog – they want to colonise their market, thereby making big returns, whether financial or even political. I simply cannot picture any future for Bluesky that doesn’t involve trapping and monetising its users, or it being used for some nefarious purpose, a la Twitter. If you do I’d genuinely love to hear what that is.
The fediverse won’t die and it’s not really in competition with Bluesky on Bluesky’s terms. Its diversity and smallness is one of the things I like about it. Hopefully it’ll adopt some of Bluesky’s better ideas to become a more welcoming, safer place. I’ll leave Bluesky to the Twitter nostalgists.