Article by Mike Masnick
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Totally agree.
Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.
The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.
To add to this, I think as long as decentralization involves having to know how to and have the money to operate a server, it’s not going to reach the point some may hope for. The monetary costs may be lower than ever, but that doesn’t address the knowledge requirements (not to mention time for setup and upkeep).
Even one of the more user friendly attempts at this so far (AT Protocol) doesn’t address this in a meaningful way, as one still has to get into the weeds of server config, domain leasing, etc.