NotesI think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group of people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.FeedUnfurl
NotesMy guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. Itâll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this (though Cory Doctorow is still skeptical about how enshittification may play out with BlueSky) but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.Unfurl
NotesFor this solution, I'm using Pipedream. I've blogged for years now and love it. Their free tier will support what I'm showing below so you should feel free to give it a try. There are many alternatives out there, but Pipedream has some great features that I think make it stand out. You'll see that especially in the first step below. But, keep in mind if you've already got a platform you would want to use, as long as you can handle the execution on new RSS items, you could probably just skip to the last step and copy and paste from my code.FeedUnfurl
NotesSo the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one thatâs inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strienâs original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former itâs commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if itâs not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authorsâ rights are central community norms.FeedUnfurl
NotesBased on the work already done by Emily Liu and Samuel Newman, a straightforward (re)implementation of their commenting systems for static sites (tomcreighton.com is compiled offline and hosted on Github Pages, for example) using plain olâ HTML and JS. Unfurl
NotesCrucially, though, what defines a member of the posting middle class is their love of the game. They donât post because theyâre trying to sell a product, or solely to advance their career. They donât post to advertise themselves or their company. They post because they must. Thereâs something fundamentally wrong with them and the worms in their brain makes them spend entire days posting away on the computer.FeedUnfurl
NotesBluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today.
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for. It is Bluesky's term, and I think Bluesky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they can.FeedUnfurl
NotesI built Sill because I value the people in my social network, and I believe I can learn the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill listens to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so Iâve been using it myself, Sill has completely changed my relationship to my social network.Unfurl
NotesIn practice, this means that users can see posts by people they follow on the app, the standard view Bluesky defaults to. But they can equally opt to see whatâs popular with friends, an algorithmically-dictated selection of posts that your peers enjoy. There are feeds specifically for scientists, curated by those working in the field, or ones to promote Black voices, which are often thinned out by algorithmic filtering. One feed even specifically promotes âquiet postersâ â users who post infrequently, and whose views would otherwise be drowned out by those who share every opinion with their followers.FeedUnfurl
NotesI still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we canât help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.FeedUnfurl
NotesBut I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the âStarter Packsâ that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. Whatâs happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky. FeedUnfurl
NotesAll this to say: the Bluesky team seems like theyâre earnestly working toward a decentralized platform, but they have a lot of work ahead of them. Years of effort, in my estimation. In the meantime, Bluesky is slightly more decentralized than, say, Facebook â but not by much. Yes, you can host your own data. Yes, you can scrape all of the content on the network. But you canât do anything with it unless youâre attached to the Bluesky service. I believe this will change with time, but it will be prohibitively expensive and weâre not there yet.FeedUnfurl
NotesI don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule â I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs â is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
How Iâm trying to use BlueSky without getting burned again - Welcome
Automatically Posting to Bluesky on New RSS Items
Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web
down in the posting mines / poking at ghosts
Introducing Sill | Tyler Fisher
Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media | New Scientist
Is Bluesky the New Twitter? - The Atlantic
The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet
Maybe Bluesky has âwonâ | anderegg.ca
Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) â Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow