The hope is being open and decentralised are counteracting forces to keep bluesky in check if they attempt to pull the rug.
We're yet to see how this turns out in practice. I do fear that the ATProto model means that Bluesky is still a pretty central component in the ecosystem. Mastodon, in comparison, seems to be more resiliant to one 'instance' screwing things up.
If Bluesky shut down all their servers tomorrow with no notice, what will happen to the network? If Mastodon shut down their servers (mastodon.social), users on that instance would be screwed, but me and many of the people I follow aren't on there so we would be fine.
I can’t tell what their business model is - it seems creepily like the original twitter in that it’s not about making money but about making connections etc etc. Which is great until you need money.
Is the plan to make a new app every 5-10 years when the old one crashes and burns for the same reasons? Surely the VC money will run out at some point.
Well, that’s basically the history of social networks thus far, so, I mean, sure, why not?
Obviously it’d be nice if it was the first social network not to either implode (Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter), or fade into irrelevance (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Digg), or just ossify into mind-numbing tedium (Facebook, LinkedIn), but, well, if it does, presumably there’ll be another one along at some point.
(I realise that you could probably argue Digg either way, here. Digg had a multi-paradigm end.)
Bluesky reminds me of Twitter around ~2008, and Twitter only really got enshittified to the point that I barely use it this year. So I'm optimistic that we'll get a good decade in at least.
And we can takeaway our data. Everyone at Bluesky seems quite aligned on building systems with user sovereignty:
> one of bluesky’s mottos is “the company is a future adversary,” so we have to design this service in a way that preserves user choice & freedom
> users should own their data, identity, and relationships on the social internet, and devs should never get locked out of the ecosystems that they build
For all the shrill man-child cries of 'censorship!', there's protocols underlying already for you to host yourself! People do! Heavens spare us from these X-grade losers.
There's a bunch of right wing trolls who filmed themselves signing up & posting really shitty mean things. These are not well intended people; this is boundary pushing. You either lose by becoming a Nazi bar, or if you listen to them you lose by having their snivelling crocodile tears to deal with forever.
These folks can go run their own PDS! But generally I think nothing of value was lost, that the network has rightly refused to let itself be degraded.
Also, I suspect there was something else going on there, because there are lots of bigots on Bluesky. The “Very British Bigotry” blocklist (for fancy modern/Rowling—style transphobes), say, has literally thousands of people, completely unbanned, on it; Bluesky is really fairly small-l liberal about post content. One thing that they’re somewhat strict on is profile content, and I would speculate that those performatively getting banned are doing so on the strength of putting shit in their profile.
That's honestly the nice thing about BlueSky, you can't ban anyone from the network entirely and filtering / moderation tools are put in the hands of users to do with as they please.
If you get no engagement because you're on everyone's blocklist well that can't be on anyone except you since every user opts in to them.
While I prefer Mastodon to Bluesky, it’s for the same reason. Anyone can spin up a Mastodon server. Anyone else is free to say, nah, I don’t want to talk to them. That doesn’t prevent that server from existing and peering with like-minded instances.
