Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
50 years is nothing. Its not even a generation. Tech might move faster than ever, but collective human culture, the REAL core of it? The truly basic stuff, like “anyone can learn to read”, is as slow as ever.
Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.
Did you not understand when I layed out how global communication can facilitate learned compassion on a global scale, allowing for world peace? As well as the kind of decision making that doesn’t destroy the planet? That’s my “revolutionary application”.
How if, we can stop caring about whatever men like Putin and Trump care about, on a cultural level, then the way people like them navigate society can become utterly unacceptable on a socially fundamental level.
And before you say, “that’s stupid, it’ll never happen” that’s probably what the nobility thought about peasants learning to read.
I think that every person on earth has the capacity to be raised into a compassionate being that would not sacrifice the well being of others to enrich themselves beyond their basic needs. Or at least enough of us can be, that the ones who can’t, are too few to matter.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Or maybe, in a couple hundred years, it will be untinkable that children ever worked in sweatshops.
Yeeeeah, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. Let’s leave it there.
Fine.
I’ll leave you with this. Modern media might go through a hundred times more content every passing year.
But I think the average speed at which people can change their minds, or the number of times the average person does it throughout their life, is exactly the same as it was ten thousand years ago.
There is a maximum speed at which collective humanity can figure certain things out, and while some things are happening faster than ever, others, are happening at a fixed speed and at a scale no-one alive today will live to see.
I want you to think about what that means when it comes to the way mankind learns to apply something like social media, or any other technology, towards doing good.
The change I hope social media can facilitate, isn’t the kind that happens in 50 years. It’s the kind that happens over several hundred. Maybe more.