Who would use the new network? It would just be Mastodon Vs Twitter again. All the people you want to read the tweets of would (still) be on Blue Sky, not Black Sky or Red Sky or President Zelen Sky or whatever.
"Convince a HN user that a corporation with the ability to cut you off from your feed sources for more profit won't do exactly that and just because they use something decentralised-ish today doesn't mean they have to keep using that thing if they don't want to" challenge (difficulty: impossible)
> "Convince a HN user that a corporation with the ability to cut you off from your feed sources for more profit won't do exactly that
It's not just a technical restriction though. It's also a legal restriction. Bluesky PBLLC is a public benefit corporation and they are at least in moderate part beholden to their charter.
More importantly, their initial investment contract requires them to further the decentralisation of social media and exposes them to legal consequences should they deviate from that mission.
Those combined make it effectively impossible for them to lock in bluesky. Doing so would require technical changes that would be under no uncertain terms against the charter of the company and against the terms of the investment contracts that initially funded the company. It's a poison pill that would kill the company and destroy any "shareholder value" the moment they try to lock down the service or lock in the users.
You aren't going to see them try this type of brazen lock-in because it'd be explicitly harmful to every investor/VC and saddle the company in legal hell until it smoulders into ash.
OpenAI managed to escape its nonprofit status, becoming incredibly closed and self-serving. There's no reason to expect any other VC-funded nonprofit won't do the same.
Sure they may. And the moment they try to it'll signal to the entire ecosystem what is coming, giving us time to migrate people off to third parties and batten down the hatches. A change like that never happens overnight.
Why didn't everyone abandon Twitter for Mastodon when Elon bought it? Why didn't they even abandon it for Blue Sky until years later? Why is Twitter still as busy as it was when Elon took it over?
Because it requires a new account. Migrating PDS on bluesky does not require a new account, is invisible/transparent to your followers and following, and the end goal is that migration will be easy enough that you can do it in less than 5 minutes with no technical skill.
Bluesky/atproto is still very early/very young but the general theme is to focus on the UX and ergonomics to make decentralisation viable without forcing the user to be technical enough to care about it.
i.e. The end goal is that people should be able to say "fuck bluesky", click a button, wait for a loading bar to finish, and continue using bluesky without using bluesky PBLLC stuff.
To be clear we are not at this point yet and bluesky PBLLC is not suddenly hostile yet either. Triage is in order of priorities so some more important UX aspects are being handled first.
My personal prediction is that this should be a solved problem within less than a year but of course we'll see.
This isn't strictly true. If you can sign a did document (i.e. you've set up a recovery key), even if your old PDS refuses to cooperate (or disappears entirely) you can still move to a new PDS and deactivate your account on the old PDS (as this is done via your did document)[1]. It's not exactly trivial to do currently but tools are being developed that automate the process and render all this down into easy to use apps.
> or if you get banned from the PLC directory
This is technically true (for did:plc users) but this isn't a thing that's happened in the past and in the event it happens in the future (or even is seriously discussed in the future), did:plc will be in a substantially different situation than it is currently and the community should be situated by then to handle a federated or coordinated PLC directory.
"Convince a HN user that a corporation with the ability to cut you off from your feed sources for more profit won't do exactly that and just because they use something decentralised-ish today doesn't mean they have to keep using that thing if they don't want to" challenge (difficulty: impossible)