I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky.
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I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I can't wait to use Bluesky, but I will not be joining Bluesky. As much as I trust and respect the Bluesky executives and board members I am acquainted with, I believe the service itself is insufficiently enshittification-resistant to trust:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media:
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/
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I've met Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber on a few occasions and heard her speak several times and I'm hugely impressed with her documented commitment to make "enshittification-resistant" social media:
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/
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Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are *extremely* enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost::
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
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Some of Bluesky's most innovative and well-developed features are *extremely* enshittification-resistant, like "composable moderation," which gives users an extraordinary degree of control over their feeds, which means that the service's owners can't readily dial down the amount of desirable information in those feeds in order to create space for ads or posts that someone has paid to boost::
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
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(Or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last.)
What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky *users* to sidestep those blocks.
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(Or, as is the case with Twitter, the personal maunderings of the service's boss and whichever esoteric fascist crony talked to him last.)
What's more, this composable moderation, along with an open API for clients, allows Bluesky (the company) to adhere to its legal obligations to block content, while allowing Bluesky *users* to sidestep those blocks.
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For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag.
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For example, Bluesky has a labeling service that flags content that has to be blocked under Turkey's system of authoritarian censorship, and, by default, the Bluesky client blocks anything with that flag for Turkish users. But users can turn off that block, and/or use an alternative Bluesky client that doesn't pay attention to the blocked-in-Turkey flag.
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Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification.
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Same goes for the new British system of mass censorship under the Online Safety Act: Bluesky the company will do an age-verification process with users of its official client (like all age verification, this system is janky and it sucks), but UK users who choose a different client (one that isn't worried about being sanctioned by the UK government) can access all of Bluesky without any age verification.
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But the key anti-enshittification measure - federation - has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers.
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But the key anti-enshittification measure - federation - has lagged on Bluesky. For most of Bluesky's history, it's been impossible to participate in the Bluesky service without being a Bluesky user, because the most critical parts of the Bluesky network were incredibly expensive to operate (tens of millions of dollars per year), and lacked any tooling to make it easy to create independent, federated servers.
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Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).
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Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).
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Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) *at the moment*. But Bluesky has outside investors - the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital - and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths.
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Now, I happen to think pretty highly of the management of Bluesky (the company) *at the moment*. But Bluesky has outside investors - the distressingly stupid- and sinister-sounding Blockchain Capital - and if these people get it into their heads to enshittify Bluesky, then can force good actors off the board of directors, fire the management, and replace them with standard-issue corporate sociopaths.
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What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky - that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service - means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another.
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What's more, the fact that users are hostage to Bluesky - that they have no way to part ways with the company without parting ways with the people they value on the service - means that new management can torment Bluesky users with impunity, so long as these torments are kept to a level such that Bluesky users hate the company less than they love one another.
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By contrast, with federation - the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service - investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors *don't* understand this, well, *users can leave* - without enduring any switching costs.
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By contrast, with federation - the ability to part ways with the Bluesky company without losing access to the service - investors might understand that if they turn the screws on users, those users will find it trivial to leave the company's servers, because doing so won't cost them access to the service. And if the investors *don't* understand this, well, *users can leave* - without enduring any switching costs.
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The good news here is that Bluesky has made *enormous* progress in true federation. The cost of operating a full Bluesky stack has fallen from *tens of millions* of dollars per year to *tens* of dollars per month:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
This is an extremely welcome development and it goes a long way toward enshittification-proofing the Bluesky service, and some way to enshittification-proofing Bluesky, the company.
But Bluesky, the company, still needs *serious* work.
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M malte@radikal.social shared this topic
