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
Comment on Be Wary of Bluesky
kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 days agoIt not necessarily about evil intentions, instead that without an easy off-ramp for users, a platform is eventually guaranteed to get enshittified, especially if they rely on investor money (which Bluesky does, see their post 1, post 2).
Cory Doctorow wrote a few pieces about the topic:
isidro_carle@lemmy.today 2 days ago
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fair enough. But, as you know already, AT Protocol is not chained to Bluesky. Other things are already being built on it (Blacksky for instance). Sure, the startup costs of federation are high, but that was a technical choice. To insist that it’s all a plot to become the next evil Twitter continues to feel a bit swivel-eyed to me.
73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
This is yet another version of the ridiculous “we’re decentralized in theory” argument which the article does address. In practice it is chained because they are in complete control of the real-world use of it.
People are even worried about Google’s control over Android recently and Google has much less power over AOSP than Bluesky Corp. has over ATproto.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They’re not. I mentioned Blacksky.
As I understand it, the their endgame is that Bluesky will be a big fish in a pond of other fish, and that the best way to get that fishpond is to make Bluesky as good a product as possible, hence the (limited) VC money.
As a strategy it has risks but so does the alternative. To make the obvious comparison, UX on the fediverse is rubbish, with an incomprehensible onboarding funnel, amateurish design, servers that keep disappearing. There’s a reason Bluesky has eaten the fediverse’s lunch.
With respect, I think people here are making this into a sterile religious war when really it’s a disagreement about strategy. Some of the people who vouch for Bluesky I have been following for years. They want exactly the same things as most people here. Personally, I see no reason to question their intentions.
KentNavalesi@mstdn.social 2 days ago
@JubilantJaguar @73ms
I'll take the "eeewww ugly UI" risk over the "high barriers to decentralization" risk.
73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Blacksky does not fundamentally change the situation. They’ve got a yearly budget in excess of $100,000 and roughly 0.01% of the users. Bluesky can make all those users completely disappear from the other 99.99% with the press of a button and in the case of Link they did exactly that.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
that tells a lot.