this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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You have to explain to me why you think massive tech corporations are going to behave differently here than they always do. Every large tech company behaves like Microsoft after a certain size in terms of values and actions, and they will do their best to mine the valuable aspects of the fediverse out and silo them away in a way that can be monetized.
I consider Flipboard or Mozilla owning instances to be a far different question because these are relatively small corporations, they aren’t Meta, they don’t have more cash on hand than entire countries.
Moderation is the hard part about social media, who gets to moderate, how moderation is handled between communities and how much human moderation genuinely happens from within the context of communities are all the important questions.
Again, what happens when Bluesky’s investor’s come knocking and want monetization? At that point is the CEO really just going to say “we can’t do that, it would give us more profits but it would be wrong to undercut the openness of Bluesky!”. It is frankly ridiculous to assume this would happen, the same story will play out that always plays out here.
You can either make huge amounts of money off of social media and payback your investors or you can make a healthy community, pick one. Unless you are a massive corporation with a lottttt of investors to please, then there was never really a choice no matter how long your investors let you attempt to fool your customers into thinking so before you hit the gas on cashing in (Reddit).
This all implies Bluesky can be considered a massive tech corp (which it honestly isn't even with investors, definitely not compared to Meta, or even Mozilla at this point), and can even be monetised.
In the event that they do attempt that, users can move to a different PDS and not lose any of their data - that's how AT was built. While on AP, it's dependent on if the software powering the account supports migration, and even then I've not seen an implementation that carries over all of the user's data (Mastodon only does followers/following, Lemmy has no migration whatsoever). That's not to say it's impossible, but I've not seen it happen.
But what is the business model here? Can you honestly tell me with a straight face that you trust them?
After a certain point I don’t care about technical arguments about how the AT protocol is better than AP or how technical aspects of it make it impervious to being controlled, there are always ways. The way we stop it is political, not technical, and just trusting Bluesky will be benevolent towards its federated users indefinitely is not a winning political strategy here in terms of the power dynamics between the ruling class (people like Jack Dorsey) and the rest of us.
Further I bet most of the people involved in Bluesky are really passionate and genuine in their desire, but ultimately their good intentions don’t interface at all with the reality of the structure they are operating in, i.e. an investor backed corporation seeking to profit off of a social network backed by some of the richest most powerful people in the tech world (even if they haven’t directly poured huge amounts of capital into it, they could, the option is there).
You have to ask, why the hell would they be genuinely offering us the future we want for the fediverse? It makes no sense for them too since they simply stand to lose by creating that future for us.
Bluesky's development has been pretty democratic, moreso than Mastodon where one guy basically leads the entire trajectory of the fediverse (at least from a mainstream perspective) from what I heard.
As for Jack, hasn't been on Bluesky for a while now - he prefers Nostr. Even though he's on the board, he's not attended any meetings nor has he dictated how the platform should go. He just threw money at it and ran after the community didn't take him seriously.
Who owns it though? Who are the investors? How are they planning to recoup their investment?
Jay Graber is the CEO, dunno about the investors but I don't care tbh. If Bluesky does go to shit, the protocol lets me move away without losing my data.
Ok well similarly I don’t care about the supposed promises of longterm openness with Bluesky or how that openness is “locked in” by a bunch of technical details that seem to me there a million ways to undermine at a later date when again, investors come knocking.