I would like to use Bluesky.
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If leaving the service is *free*, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users.
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These devils only sit on your shoulder, whispering temptations and threats, because they think that you can make things worse without spoiling their investment. They're not cruel, they're greedy. They will only insist on enshittification that they believe they can profit from. If they understand that forcing you to enshittify the service will send all your users packing and leave them with *nothing*, they will very likely not force you to wreck your service.
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And of course, if they *are* so greedy that they force your hand anyway, then your users will be able to escape. Your service will be wrecked and you'll be broke, which sucks for you, but you're just one person and your pain is vastly outweighed by the relief for the millions of people who escape your service when it goes sour.
There's a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It's called a "Ulysses Pact."
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Ulysses Pacts are named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens' sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens' song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens' song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
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Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact - think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.
There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not.
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Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned - it makes you *more* of a mark, not less.
Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her.
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At least one of the board members there, @mmasnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don't agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.
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But even the best boards can make bad calls. It was just a couple years ago that we had to picket to stop the board of the @internetsociety - where I had several dear old friends and comrades - from selling control of every .ORG domain to a shadowy hedge-fund run by mustache-twirling evil billionaires:
How We Saved .ORG: 2020 in Review
If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it had agreed to sell the Public Interest Registry—the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
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Bluesky lacks the *one* federated feature that is *absolutely* necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only *one* Bluesky server.
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A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.
That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital:
On Bluesky and enshittification
Bluesky has announced a $15M series A raise by a crypto venture capital fund, leading many people to talk about 'enshittification'. But is enshittification the right way to look at things?
fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)
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Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this *at all*. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's *leverage* that enshittifies a service.
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A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty - and thus worthless - server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
My publishing process is a *lot* of work and adding another service to it represents a *huge* amount of future labor:
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But I would *leap* into Bluesky and gladly taken on all that extra work, every day - if I knew that I couldn't get trapped there.
I 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.
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bryan newboldreplied to Cory Doctorow last edited by [email protected]
@pluralistic it is confusing to read this because we have done basically everything you propose in the AT Protocol, and it has been live in the network for a long time now. ensuring that service migration is easy and seamless is literally one of the reasons we did *not* use ActivityPub.
You can read how easy the process is here:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Migrating%20PDS%20Account%20with%20%60goat%60On, I would mention, and independently run blogging service built on atproto! which bsky can't exclude/control
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@pluralistic you say that we haven't "added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service". we have done that. what I think you *really* want is a peer running actual competitive alternatives for each component. That is similar, but different!
If it is possibly, why isn't anybody doing it? That is a great question! we have theories, and have done a lot already to encourage it (open code, open protocol, docs, etc)
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@pluralistic I think the biggest reason is that it is a bunch of work just to prove a point. folks who love administering Linux systems are already running Mastodon instances; there is some path-history involved.
The main thing we are focused on right now is enabling folks to build entirely *new* applications on the protocol, which is much more fun, and many more folks are doing that. thread here:
https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3l6pz5fhrv72j -
@pluralistic there are probably things we can communicate better, and some clarifying demos or signaling we could do. "federation" is a loaded term right now with a bunch of ActivityPub connotation, maybe the type of anti-exclusion / anti-enclosure we have built needs a new name.
Look forward to seeing you at the CoNEXT workshop on decentralization at UCLA in December, maybe we can discuss then.
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@bnewbold so if I had 100,000 followers on Blue sky and then I left Blue sky could I still talk to those 100,000 followers?
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bryan newboldreplied to Cory Doctorow last edited by [email protected]
@pluralistic yes!
moreover, those 100k followers would probably not even realize you changed service providers. you can use your own domain (which you own) as a handle. the authority for your content is you, not the service provider, so all your old content (in threads, interactions) continue to just work.
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@bnewbold @pluralistic Can you switch bgs/relay and still stay in touch. Or run your own? AIUI the relay is the hard part.
