I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But 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.
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Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you’ll make.In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.
That’s where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server.
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
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Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.
Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky’s purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called “Blockchain Capital,” which, at this point, might as well be “Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital”). But I don’t agree with this at all. It’s not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.
A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users’ lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
This is exactly why I’m also not that interested in Bluesky. It’s not decentralized in a way that makes it resilient to a Musk-style takeover.
PDSs are cool, Mastodon can learn something from Bluesky’s tech stack. But Mastodon made the right choices from the beginning to be decentralized for resiliency.
I don’t want to sound like I’m just correcting you for the sake of it, but it’s actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn’t around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca
So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn’t need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!
Did something specific already happen with Bluesky, or are people just expecting it because VC vultures now have their claws in it?
The entire protocol design of BlueSky reeks of bait&switch, but yes right now it is mainly the intensified expectation that it will happen sooner or later.
Gotcha. Yeah I choose to use Mastodon, I’d much rather support the open community built option than the option built by a company with a profit motive, I just try to stay in the loop about stuff
Thanks for the answer :)
No, but the whole point of Doctorow’s Enshittification essay is that it inevitably will. In the same way animals keep evolving into crabs due to convergent evolution, social media companies will keep turning into shit because the market incentives push them that way.
But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.
Thanks for sharing. Reminds me of a few memes on [email protected] with their fake federation
I wouldn’t call Bluesky’s federation fake, we’d need a working definition of ‘federation’ for that, but I would say it lacks meaningful federation.
It’s probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.
The switching cost point is profound and real. You might just see that same dynamic at your place of employment.
One of the big turning points for Facebook for them to increase the difficulty of switching was cutting off RSS as a way to syndicate content into Facebook. After that, content had to be manually created in Facebook, instead of automatically imported from a third party source based on standard protocols. This forced people away from their chosen content authoring system into Facebook’s opinionated, inflexible, ad infested walled garden.
My god it doesn’t have to be so “on or off”! There are plenty of ways to create a post and it sends it directly to Mastodon AND Bluesky. Build both audiences because there’s a good chance that you’ll be connecting with very different groups of people.
It’s really funny because Cory always champions POSSE. Post (on)own site, share everywhere.
And it’s funny because he mostly does that.
What does that have to do with Cory’s concerns? They don’t want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.
If only one could move old posts etc over to a new account and truly migrate servers on Mastodon
Sharkey allows it
can import your exported posts from Mastodon and most of its forks, Pleroma / Akkoma, Misskey / Firefish and forks, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, including attachments (threading may not work perfectly, and other people’s replies to your posts may not get imported)
I’ll use it for now while it’s good and ditch it if/when it enshittifies just as I ditched Reddit and Twitter. The mistake I won’t repeat is relying on it. If I have to bail, it won’t be difficult this time.
It’s not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.
Technically more precise, but for companies the leverage doesn’t really exist without the outside capital. Musk taking over twitter was the use of capital to get the leverage.
I can’t think of any business where the owner did a 180 without catering to outside capital or the company being bought out by outside capital.
Blusky has 13 millions registered users but what about their monthly active users?
Looks like stats are posted here: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
So around 10%?
