this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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🦋 Bluesky Social

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Bluesky is a federated social network built on ATProtocol.

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Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet (www.wired.com)
submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Archive link: https://archive.ph/N8QBu

Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky?

This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you’re not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can’t find it, you can build it. You don’t get this level of control anywhere else.

Emphasis added on last sentence. If nothing else tells you an interview is as much marketing as it is aiming to be genuinely informative, it should be statements like this.

That last sentence is basically a lie, as anyone across ActivityPub networks can tell you. I would say I don't know why they would say this, but I do know at least one reason: marketing.

It can be argued ActivityPub doesn't enable the same level of control, but the problem is that it's so damn flexible that it'd be somewhat disingenuous to do so.

AuthTransfer has similar problems but of a different sort, primarily that too many people not using it don't realize how it's still rapidly changing and that already there are some independent and semi-independent platforms emerging built with it.

What remains important to keep an eye out for is if/when the AuthTransfer protocol is fully released from Bluesky's ownership/control and becomes an open standard. I think that's as important or more important than any fully independent "instance", to put it in ActivityPub terms, built with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Which of these commercial platforms did not ever plot for that?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

lol

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c

Now that dozens of people are hosting their own relays and we have third-party AppViews, the first posts are being made to Bluesky without using any of Bluesky PBC's architecture, but sure it's not decentralized and will never happen or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.