I have returned, with tea

[cwebber@social.coop]

Hello, I am back again. Did you miss me? I still am not reading notifications.

Help I started writing this summary at 11am and it is now 6pm here I have wasted a whole day of work

But I have tea, and I also flossed my teeth, and it is time to resume this thread. If you are here, you know why.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Before we go any further, earlier I mentioned the US House of Representatives, and here I am giving a MASSIVE content warning for transphobia

But @evangreer is the coolest fucking person for standing up to Rep. Mace at the Project Libery summit https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/

[cwebber@social.coop]

What I am trying to say is I don't have many heroes but @evangreer is absolutely a heroine of mine

You should donate to @fight they are some of the only people doing sensible advocacy against terrible internet laws

Also fuck TERFs

But anyway

[cwebber@social.coop]

Also you have reached it: the third secret egg

You have now collected the egg triforce and can defeat Gender Ganon

If you want to

The power was in you all along

But let's continue.

[cwebber@social.coop]

It's time, we have reached the second to last section: "Preparing for the organization as a future adversary."

I love this one because I love that phrase, and the best part is that the Bluesky team came up with it, "the organization is a future adversary". It's genuinely good and self reflective

[cwebber@social.coop]

Occasionally an org creates a phrase like this, and back in the day Google had "Don't be evil"

And yeah, people criticize Google for never having been sincere but it gave an opportunity for people inside and outside the organization to critique Google on its own stated values. That was good.

[cwebber@social.coop]

It was *at least* good insofar as the moment Google retired the phrase as never really meaning anything anyway, as evil as Google may have been before, Google got *noticably* worse.

To Bluesky people internally: keep that phrase going as long as you can, and use it reflectively.

[cwebber@social.coop]

As opposed to Google's "Don't be evil", a commandment for the everpresent, "the organization is a future adversary" acknowledges the realities of the future, that it is uncertain, and in fact, that power-dynamics-wise, there will be pressure to make things worse.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Making design decisions in the present which guard against the future is one of the most important things we can do. It is one of the most important reasons to choose FOSS licenses, for instance, which provide an exit plan and also counterbalance against temptation to enshittify a project.

[cwebber@social.coop]

To this end, Bluesky's goals of "credible exit" are actually very important. It creates a similar pressure for the organization itself to stay true as long as it can, even acknowledging the organization as a future adversary, and actually preparing for it.

I am pro-Bluesky-credible-exit.

[cwebber@social.coop]

And there *will* be a lot of pressure: Bluesky has taken VC money as investments; the pattern of such is that early on, things are very good and flexible, and after some time, the investors start placing pressure to enshittify.

I have seen good peoples' orgs clawed from their hands. It happens.

[cwebber@social.coop]

This happens despite the very best people with the very best intentions. Talk to early Twitter co-founders and they will tell you the org that things became was not the org that they envisioned.

A future adversary indeed. So we should plan for it today.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Before we continue further, I have done about every job imaginable in a FOSS project/organization. Fundraising, by far, is the worst, and the most stressful.

It's incredibly hard to raise anything to do anything. I think that's worth acknowledging.

[cwebber@social.coop]

The structure of an organization does matter. There's a reason that @spritely is a 501(c)(3) in the US. Any money we take in is a donation: we aren't "delivering on an investment" (though we must deliver on *results*)

Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation, also interesting

[cwebber@social.coop]

A Public Benefit Corporation has a mission for the public good, but can take investments in the way a nonprofit cannot. This also means it can move much faster. Given the influx of users to Bluesky, taking investments this way may have been the only load handling route available this fast.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Again, this is all tuned to "What is Bluesky trying to build?"

Bluesky might not be a good "decentralized Twitter replacement", but it is a good "Twitter replacement" with the possibility of "credible exit"

[cwebber@social.coop]

That Bluesky is providing needs for many users who are looking for refuge from a white supremacist site *today* is something to pause and acknowledge the difficulty and scope of doing so quickly and in the moment. I'm glad Bluesky is here at this stressful geopolitical moment in history.

[cwebber@social.coop]

There will be a lot of pressure soon from investors: run ads, make premium accounts that do not actually make sense in a decentralized way, so on and so on.

In this way, "credible exit" is the most important thing for Bluesky the organization and its community to push on *today*

[serapath@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cwebber

Why give them soooooo much space?
Why talk soooo much about bluesky?

Did they pay you for it?
I havent seen you do this for other platforms, especially when mastodon and even nostr exist that are way more decentralized. It seems kinda weird and unexpected

[cwebber@social.coop]

What I will *not* accept is the goalposts being moved on decentralization and federation. Bluesky is neither decentralized nor federated.

If Bluesky wants to become so, it has an enormous amount of work to do, particularly in terms of architectural design.

Blogs are decentralized, Google is not.