- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
[…]
Bluesky is built on a protocol intended to mitigate this problem. The AT Protocol describes itself as “an open, decentralized network for building social applications”. The problem is that, […] “A federatable service isn’t a federated one”. The intention to create a platform that users can leave at will, without losing their social connections, does not mean users can actually do this. It’s a technical possibility tied to an organisational promise, rather than a federated structure that enables people to move between services if they become frustrated by Bluesky.
[…]
The problem is that, as Doctorow observes, “The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good, the more we tempt their managers to break their promises and never open up a federation”. If you were a venture capitalist putting millions into Bluesky in the hope of an eventual profit, how would you feel about designing the service in a way that reduces exit costs to near zero? This would mean that “An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users”. The developing social media landscape being tied in the Generative AI bubble means this example in particular is one we need to take extremely seriously.
[…]
bluesky is a path toward the fediverse: where twitter, meta, etc have closed down their networks and made it impossible to leave without abandoning your connections, atproto is at least open in that we currently have functioning bridges - you can interact with bsky from mastodon etc… thus to move, you don’t need to abandon all your connections
bsky has seemed to solve the problem that the fediverse has - people understanding how to move… once people are over there, they’ll be able exposed to more of the ideas of federation and when they get dissatisfied, picking a fediverse instance won’t be such a chore because it’s not quite a black box, and they don’t have to abandon their connections
bluesky isn’t an end; it’s a means… a stepping stone that allows us to move people to true federation. for the moment, moving people from twitter and meta is hard. the goal should be to incrementally move people to more open platforms, even if they’re not perfect
They are literally just putting up a front to look like they will eventually federate while never actually delivering and people are falling for it. The vast majority of their users has no clue about what federation is and wont wont learning anything from falling into their trap. Its just another iteration in the cycle. The best we can hope for is that people get accustomed to jumping ship more aggressively.
i don’t think that’s actually true. you’re free to host your own PDS right now, it’s just an enormous cost so it’s not feasible as an end-user (which i’d argue writes off the entire point of federation right now)
but i’m not talking about federation per se… the bsky bridges work right now: users can bridge a bsky and mastodon account, so if they choose to leave bsky they can transition rather than be left all alone - that’s the biggest problem with people leaving other platforms right now
bsky gives us the path towards migration, where twitter and meta are entirely locked down