This is why I have zero trust in Bluesky.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

This is why I have zero trust in Bluesky. It's proceeding exactly like every other VC-backed corporate-funded social media platform I've ever used, starting with overt good intentions, a lot of promises to users, and absolutely no technical infrastructure to help ensure that those promises are kept.

The main difference is that Bluesky could actually build a decentralized network instead of a centralized platform. To the best of my knowledge, they haven't done so yet.

https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113414584052666033

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

I should add that there's another piece to this as well. While I've seen no shortage of centralized platforms fail, and am thus personally weary and frankly too tired to try and kick that football again, I *also* think there's progressive value in not having centralized ownership over human communication.

Right now, the best way I know how to achieve that is with decentralized protocols and infrastructure.

https://www.xgranade.com/a-progressive-case-for-the-fediverse/

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

That doesn't solve everything, not nearly. But I think it's an important progressive value, and I do think progressive organizing and activism in general needs to be more proactive about resisting centralized *ownership*.

Musk and Zuckerberg have shown the harm that centralized ownership can do to other progressive values, to be sure.

Again, it's not the complete story, but I do think it's a *part*.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

This is, as with so many things, an area where I don't have full knowledge and expertise. Perhaps I'm wrong that it's a priority for progressive movements to build structural resistance to centralized ownership, given the other tradeoffs that would need to be made at the moment to achieve that priority.

What I *know* I'm right on is that I *personally* am too tired and burnt out on the corporate social media platform cycle to try Bluesky, *even if* it's the rational and correct thing to do.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

Put differently, I do not believe in but might well be convinced of the social value of Bluesky; by contrast, I don't see any personal value in it given the immense emotional cost.

I share that to try and offer context to my agreement with Doctorow and White (who both seemed to approach in terms of the personal cost rather than the structural value), as well as to my own boundaries about what kinds of conversations I'm most happy to take part in.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

Since there's discourse going around again, I'll clarify that I think it's decentralized ownership that should be a progressive priority. To the extent that tech isn't neutral, and that tech both expresses and reinforces moral judgments, I posit that technical decisions that make it easier to decentralize ownership are more consistent with progressive values.

Decentralized protocols and infrastructure are, at the moment, the best bet I know of to achieve that.

Again, though, I may be wrong.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

The fact that I might be wrong is also why I try to position my response to Bluesky as a personal one: I'm fucking tired.

Wherever discourse lands after reasonable and civil discussion, it's still a big ask of folks to flock to another VC-funded social media platform on the hope (however reasonable and informed!) that it will be different this time.

It's ok to make big asks, but it's also important to recognize them as being big, I think?

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

Fuck, I'll go even further and make a big ask of my own: if you like Bluesky and honestly and rationally think folks should move over there, please consider that the entrenched dug-in defenses of AP-based federation *may*, in addition to the rational and cooler arguments to that effect, also be a form of trauma response.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

I've personally watched the web I know and love almost disappear, broken into a thousand tiny apps that don't interoperate.

When I look at new shit, I see all the ways it can go bad because I've lived through them. So have others, of course, but we respond to the same experiences differently? I'm tired and I'm frankly *scared* of new VC-backed platforms because of how wrong they've gone before.

That's maybe not as rational as you might like, but it is real.