Context:
this is a bit lengthy, so, if you want to go 'Bluesky can suck a dick' and move on then you can, otherwise click here
The election of Donald Trump, with Elon Musk claiming to have been the wind beneath his wings, has been the final straw for a lot of people on Xitter who have, until now, acted like this:
Whole communities have now moved en masse, eg the majority of comic book creators are now on Bluesky, leading some to declare Bluesky might end up defeating Twitter once and for all.
However, Cory Doctorow was written about why he won’t be moving to Bluesky, most recently in a post named Bluesky and enshittification where he looks at the lack of safeguards preventing enshittification:
I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage – when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile – that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
He thinks the fact that a blockchain VC having a financial stake in Bluesky isn’t an issue, if the safeguards are in place, but Dave Troy, who wrote Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn, has has been doing some digging into those currently running BS and finding a lot of post-rationalist and TESCREAL/Effective Altruism links:
3/Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically TPOT people. Who is going to win in that scenario? I don’t know, but I’m not putting money on the users. The most recent funding came from Blockchain Capital LLC…
4/🚨It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.
…
6/Possibly Bluesky can address this by discussing their funding in detail, the expectations of the funders, and whether the TPOT/PostRat community is still a principal driver of the vision for the “company.” But this all points to another rug pull in progress, and a lot of credulous people hurt.
While it is reasonable that the company acknowledged that Dorsey’s vision of “moderation by protocol” was unfeasible, it sets up a highly centralized model that is now subject to capture.
So without any safeguards and with some shifty folks involved it feels like the clock is ticking until they enshittify Bluesky and the users either stay locked in thanks to the sunk cost or switch to Threads or, finally, realise they are better off on the Fediverse.
Relevant previous memes:
- Bluesky’s fedi-washing and some context for that
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Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. This “just open the source code and change a few variables” github energy isn’t good enough for a big boy platform.
Which probably means more people need to be working on it, because I’m certain the people who have made the functional thing we have now have their hands full maintaining it and making iterative improvements.
Not that this is all “Bluesky bad, Fediverse good” as a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime and that’s OK, at least for us early adopters who are not overly concerned with the services being rough around the edges and/or lacking in key features.
An interesting reply to the thread by Dave Troy gives a more nuanced overview:
I still see Bluesky as a useful short-term Twitter alternative (Meta and Threads are already doing all the things that Bluesky is likely do in the future, it’s a lot easier to get up and going on Bluesky than Mastodon, and Blacksky is the only thing I know of in the decentralized world that’s a good path for Black Twitter. Still, even without all the important points you make, and the “we don’t have to ban Alex Jones” factor , they’re a venture-funded startup, so once they need to monetize they’re very likely to turn to an exploitative business model. So while it’s situationally useful, it’s not a promising long-term base.
And later they say:
Right now, Bluesky is a much better place for Twitter-like progressive organizing and activism than anything else in the fediverse. And it’s still contested ground; Jay and the other founders still have the balance of power (not the VC), and it’s not yet clear that they’ll fully side with fascists – and even if they do, the broader ecosystem may well split to at least some extent, and there will be a “free ATmossphere” as well as the “free fediverse” that @ophiocephalic and others (includingn me!) talk about. So building a presence there is a reasonable thing to do,.
Still also there’s a lot more to organizing on social networks than Twitter alternatives, and that’ plays to the fediverse’s strengths. So it’s all the more critical to address the fediverse’s weaknesses so that there’s another organizing and activism platform, both to support the battle on Bluesky and as an alternative power base.
a lot of the Fediverse may not be ready for primetime … lacking in key features
Such as?
Signing up is not very intuitive. My first account was on .ml and didn’t know wtf they were about
