If you’re still not convinced that Bluesky is a high risk of enshittification, imagine in 5 years time Matt Mullenweg replies to a post by a Bluesky founder with the words “I’ll buy it!”
-
If you’re still not convinced that Bluesky is a high risk of enshittification, imagine in 5 years time Matt Mullenweg replies to a post by a Bluesky founder with the words “I’ll buy it!”
(To be fair, I do think Bluesky is really interesting technically and even culturally, so I am hoping for the best for them. But it’s not truly open as long as VCs are investing in it.)
-
@ricmac I dunno, I'm not convinced.
Bluesky's main thing is that every account is technically very similar to an RSS feed. You have your own website that you can self-host.
The main Bluesky website is a feed aggregator, that displays them in a Twitter-like interface.
If Bluesky gets enshittified, then all we need is to swap to a different aggregator (like swapping Mastodon instances).
It's not the same scenario as Twitter formerly having an open API; the core tech is decentralized.
-
For example, this is my Bluesky account: https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/englishmobster.bsky.social
I can self-host that content on a domain I control, and as long as I tell the AT aggregators "Hey, look here" it can fetch it and serve all my stuff. My content is mine, I can host it, and nobody can take it from me.
It's different than self-hosting a Mastodon instance where you also get everyone else's stuff and have to deal with running a social network. It's much closer to running a personal website.
-
Bluesky's website is similar to a search engine, where it just trawls everyone announcing to the world their AT stuff. It's a major goal for them to not even be able to control the aggregator.
They talk a little about it here: https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation
They really want to make something that's more intuitive than ActivityPub for the average joe while still maintaining the billionaire-proofing that federation gives. The tech is built from the ground up to keep them from being evil one day.
-
@EnglishMobster Thanks, that’s a good explanation. I guess we shall see, as currently decentralization in Bluesky is more theoretical than current reality. So right now the only way to connect to others is through its central “search engine” service. That gives them a lot of power. But I do agree it’s a fascinating experiment and so I’m keen to see how it turns out.
