Summary
Journalists are increasingly abandoning X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, citing higher engagement and less toxicity. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X, changes like deprioritizing external links and rising hate speech have alienated many, especially marginalized groups.
Bluesky, founded by Jack Dorsey, offers a more welcoming environment, especially for journalists and activists, with 20x the engagement in some cases.
Reporters note better traffic, reduced harassment, and a focus on diverse stories.
Organizations like The Guardian and fundraising groups also report greater success on Bluesky compared to X.
“There’s no chance this leopard will eat my face.”
–Migrating Journalists, probably
More like
everyone else is, and I need to keep my job as a… you know, journalist
Well, it’s not like it’s the exact same dude who sold the old platform to fascists last time, right?
Bluesky is a registered public benefit company and Dorsey is no longer with the company and no longer on the board.
Open AI changed to a for profit company in a heartbeat and these folks can too.
More worrying is who owns them and their funding sources.
These people are why I’m barely here anymore and more on…Bluesky. And I like the format here way.more.
Phew … then we can trust the open software that is locked to one company and one instance essentially leaving control to a handful of people.
What could go wrong?
I’m not saying open software isn’t awesome. I’m simply correcting a common misconception.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with Open Software … the problem is the way Bluesky is being arranged and developed. They are essentially cornering the development to create a situation where only one company and one group maintains dominate control over everything and everyone.
The track record so far since the popular world wide internet started is that if a popular social media platform is controlled by one group, one company or even one person, it will eventually turn into a tool of monetization and control and it will eventually degrade and dissolve.
The only difference this time is Bluesky is supposedly built on open source software, which is true … but the whole platform and system is corned, controlled and managed by only one company and one group.
They’re actively working on making it easier to fork the entire platform.
There’s already 3rd party account hosts, moderation labelers, feed generators, and alternative implementations like whitewind (blogging system on top of the same account repo & lexicon architecture) were you can use the exact same account. All of these works together independently of which hosts / providers you use.
Relays and microblogging appviews (a fully functional bluesky mirror) are technically possible but more expensive to duplicate but there’s work on making that practical too.
You can already bypass PLC by using DID:Web for account identity.
The single most important thing if you want to be able to recover from bluesky going bad is to just back up your account recover signing key, and to keep a recent backup of the repo to preserve your post history and social network (follows, etc).
All the rest can be rebuilt if you have your account hey and backup. The content addressing will make it seamless!
That’s the thing about how this is all working though. I’m semi technically literate and I barely can understand most of what you just wrote. So chances are, I might be able to attempt some of the things you said and might be able to do something but realistically, I probably won’t.
The reason why Bluesky is not a good thing is that it is too complex for the average user to understand. All a new non-technical user understands is ‘it works, it works fast, I get to connect to lots of people’ and most importantly ‘I don’t need to figure anything out and I can just get to use it’.
You’re average user which is about 90% of the user base will never go through all the trouble of understanding what you just wrote or in even attempting to go through any of those steps. They are a captive audience and the developers and corporate wolves in the sidelines all understand this. They just need to herd the sheep into a large enough pen, lock them up, shut out any dissenters and start monetizing the new audience that will stay captive for a few years until it all degrades and falls apart like previous platforms.
That’s not a valid argument, your ability or inability to program this on your own, is not a realistic measure. Something being open source doesn’t make everybody a programmer, but it does give everybody a chance to look at the code. Which means chances of shenanigans are way smaller.
I understand your skepticism about BlueSky being privately held. And maybe it would be preferable if Mastodon had the success BlueSky enjoys now. But at least if BlueSky fails and becomes as bad as Xitter, Mastodon may get another chance.
“He’s said he’s sorry, and he’s not going to do it again. You’ll see. He’s changed.”
This time he bailed early though. He’s got no control of the site
No the site just owes a bunch of money to the crypto bros at Blockchain Capital.
Doesn’t matter if Dorsey isn’t there and if it’s a PBC, if the investors want a return on their investment (and they do) enshittification is coming.
Correct.
Here’s a thread about who owns and funds Bluesky.
Nice, thanks for the link. I knew almost all of this stuff but never had a place where it was all tied together and organized neatly. Now I do. Cheers.
It’s open source and designed to literally not be reliant on the company running it. Start a community appview and plc and you can bring your entire account history with you
These are aspirational goals and not at all actively true now. They are technically possible, but not actually viable as a social media network.
Its design was based on a drop in for twitter, and will always require a megacorp sized entity for it to operate, due to a “god’s eye view of all data” model requiring huge, faste data lifts to exist at all.
Best case is some opensource org like internet archive/wikipedia willing to spend 6-7 figures/month(raw costs +engineering talent) on running the service, but so far none have.
There’s already others running other relays. The appview is the most difficult, but in theory indexes on top of the data could be shared too which would reduce the need for each appview to have everything saved in advance
The relays are test level only. They are at the stage where people are dipping their toys in the water to see if it’s actually a resilient protocol.
There are no viable alternatives right now, and there may never be.
It’s not actually decentralized or federated, but keep telling yourself that.
Tell that to the people running their own PDS servers and the people running whitewind and all the other services built on the protocol