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.
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.
Just because it’s open doesn’t mean anyone can do it, but if it goes badly then a group of others could fork and rebuild.
Look at what happened to reddit … it was open source at the start with a promise that it would be controlled by the company but would later be made fully open to everyone. Those promises became less and less prominent as the years and by until no one cared anymore. The whole system had a captive audience and everything was locked up and now it’s a corporately owned money making machine that the community will never have a chance to fully control.