I would like to use Bluesky.
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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:
https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/
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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.
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@bnewbold In my last correspondence with the Bluesky dev team (5/14/24), they said:
> Getting another org outside of Bluesky PBC to run the Relay and Application service infra (mentioned above) in prod is the next milestone for de-risking the network.
I have been watching the announcements to see if this is done, and haven't seen anything or heard anything.
Is it the case that this is now live and functional?
Thanks.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Cory Doctorow last edited by
@pluralistic thanks for this great post!
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@joakimfors @pluralistic yes, there can be many independent relays in play, and all interactions continue to work.
conceptually, relays are many-to-many: users/PDS didn't really "choose" a specific relay; all full-network relays crawl the whole network and are interchangeable. other services can make use of multiple relays for redundancy
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@pluralistic that is still the situation: there is not a serious peer service provider operating those services in the network for the microblogging modality.
there is nothing preventing it: we support adversarial interop in the live network today, but no "adversary" has emerged.
hobbyists have run full-scale components as proofs of concept. there are fully independent apps (like smokesignals and whtwnd), and independent projects which index/store the full network (like clearsky)
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@bnewbold All right, please do let me know when that changes.
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Olivier Simard-Casanova 🦋replied to bryan newbold last edited by
@bnewbold @pluralistic I agree
Another part that I find particularly confusing is this
On Mastodon, moving to a different instance means that you lose all your posts
Moving also requires your previous instance to be online. If your previous instance is offline, your account is gone.
That’s two massive "switching costs" in my opinion
