#atproto

See, what makes Mastodon less worse than something like Twitter or Bluesky or, god forbid, fucking Threads, is that it has escape hatches. You may not like being told “go find another instance,” but you can go find another instance, and that is fucking spectacular. Twitter started going into the shitter even before Elon Seig Heil Musk painted a big “X” on it with his dick, but did you all just say “sucks, man,” and fuck off to another Twitter instance? No! Why not? Because there were no other fucking Twitter instances!

Describe what you want to see and watch your feed compose itself around you.

I don’t like Bluesky, or ATProto; I wish we lived in a world were community-driven projects got megabucks and we were all self-hosting little social media servers for our communities. We don’t live in that world, so we have to interoperate with VC-backed, corporate social media. When those platforms call themselves “decentralized”, I think they should deliver.

My advice -- think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff.

You need to first, stop giving them reasons to wonder about whether 'atproto' will be a tainted term by the time they launch; again, shut the fuck up Friday.

I think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group of people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.

All this to say: the Bluesky team seems like they’re earnestly working toward a decentralized platform, but they have a lot of work ahead of them. Years of effort, in my estimation. In the meantime, Bluesky is slightly more decentralized than, say, Facebook — but not by much. Yes, you can host your own data. Yes, you can scrape all of the content on the network. But you can’t do anything with it unless you’re attached to the Bluesky service. I believe this will change with time, but it will be prohibitively expensive and we’re not there yet.