Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
Yes, and the current owners have no economic incentive to change that. It’s a project backed by financial investors, which means they’ll want to get back as much money as possible as soon as possible.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some “venture capital bashing”. It’s their full right to earn their money back and do with their companies whatever they want. If I were a financial investor, I did the same (what is ignored in many discussions on this is the fact that the vast majority of VC investments fail due to their high-risk nature, but that’s a different story). I just argue that if you want a distributed and/or decentralised system, you likely need a different kind of funding and a more decentralized form of decision making.
Their initial funding came from twitter, but twitter doesn’t own it. The BlueSky Public Benefit LLC is owned by the founding team, many of whom have been working on decentralized protocols (SecureScuttlebutt, IPFS, Hypercore, XMPP, among others) since before Mastodon was a thing. The entire purpose of their company is to build the protocol, not their instance of it. Running the first instance is just a way to bootstrap the protocol.
After reading atproto.com do you still think accounts that currently exist on bsky.app won’t soon be able to migrate to another (including a self-hosted) PDS?
After reading atproto.com I still think it won’t matter, because secondary centralization will happen in the “reach” layer. That’s where the power in the system will be. As explored pretty in-depth in the blogpost that started this whole thread.
After reading this site (btw, they appear to be using Cloudflare for their decentralized service) it doesn’t change anything. They indeed “may soon be able to migrate”, may “federate soon”, and all that, but it simply isn’t. It is a centralized service, and they promise once again that this time everything will really be better.