#bluesky

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!

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.

If Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web.#

It is very, very unlikely that in the Mastodon universe, Sarah Kendzior’s account would suddenly have globally vanished. It is quite likely that the shot-a-man post would have been edited appropriately, and possible that it would have just vanished.

I believe we are at a similar juncture with social apps as we have been with open source thirty five years ago. There’s a new movement on the block. I like to call it “open social”. There are competing visions for what “open social” should be like. I think the AT Protocol created by Bluesky is the most convincing take on it so far. It’s not perfect, and it’s a work in progress, but there’s nothing I know quite like it.

Bluesky’s early promise has eroded. The platform’s inconsistent and retaliatory moderation practices have drifted steadily rightward, protecting prominent racists and transphobes while suppressing those who speak out against them. Even mild criticism of the company’s failures to safeguard marginalized users is now met with shadowbans, takedowns, or silence. That’s not leadership. That’s an abdication of responsibility — and we deserve better.

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.

A bot that posts questions without context.

Social media as we know it is dying, but we’re not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces where the metrics that matter aren’t engagement and growth but understanding and connection, where algorithms serve the community rather than strip-mining it.

Hooray to Bluesky for releasing its new RSS feeds! Now anyone can now obtain an RSS feed for any Bluesky user. We've taken them for a test drive, and here's what you should know.

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.

My guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. It’ll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this (though Cory Doctorow is still skeptical about how enshittification may play out with BlueSky) but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.

For this solution, I'm using Pipedream. I've blogged for years now and love it. Their free tier will support what I'm showing below so you should feel free to give it a try. There are many alternatives out there, but Pipedream has some great features that I think make it stand out. You'll see that especially in the first step below. But, keep in mind if you've already got a platform you would want to use, as long as you can handle the execution on new RSS items, you could probably just skip to the last step and copy and paste from my code.

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strien’s original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former it’s commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if it’s not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authors’ rights are central community norms.

Based on the work already done by Emily Liu and Samuel Newman, a straightforward (re)implementation of their commenting systems for static sites (tomcreighton.com is compiled offline and hosted on Github Pages, for example) using plain ol’ HTML and JS.

Crucially, though, what defines a member of the posting middle class is their love of the game. They don’t post because they’re trying to sell a product, or solely to advance their career. They don’t post to advertise themselves or their company. They post because they must. There’s something fundamentally wrong with them and the worms in their brain makes them spend entire days posting away on the computer.

Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today. However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable. However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for. It is Bluesky's term, and I think Bluesky should embrace that term fully in all contexts and work that they can.

I built Sill because I value the people in my social network, and I believe I can learn the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill listens to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so I’ve been using it myself, Sill has completely changed my relationship to my social network.

Find the most popular links from your Mastodon/Bluesky networks

In practice, this means that users can see posts by people they follow on the app, the standard view Bluesky defaults to. But they can equally opt to see what’s popular with friends, an algorithmically-dictated selection of posts that your peers enjoy. There are feeds specifically for scientists, curated by those working in the field, or ones to promote Black voices, which are often thinned out by algorithmic filtering. One feed even specifically promotes “quiet posters” – users who post infrequently, and whose views would otherwise be drowned out by those who share every opinion with their followers.

I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. And so we can’t help but try to keep them going, for however long we can.

But I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the “Starter Packs” that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. What’s happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky.

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.

Did you know? You can self-host and/or mirror almost all of Bluesky's infrastructure today!

I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted. My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.