Does that mean after Bluesky reaches critical mass, it'll turn the federation off, like Google Chat killing its XMPP federation?
For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.
For clarity: I'd love to see this comment and say "I was wrong" 5 or 10 years later.
You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.
Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services, etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of time.
Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a moment's notice.
It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at least I have backups and backup plans for everything.
Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.
I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?
I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.
Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.
I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.
- [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...
We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.
Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.
This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake.
Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead.
This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.
Email is open, but if GMail decides to block all email from you, you're toast. And while GMail is large, their percentage of email inboxes pales in comparison to BlueSky's percentage of AtProto users (which is near 100% at the moment).
Yes, once things are federated, other folks start gaining some power over the protocol by virtue of usage. However, if 99% of people remain with BlueSky, everyone else essentially has no power.
mastodon.social has around 15% of the Fediverse on its server and it means that it has a lot of power. Mastodon (the software) is around 72% of the Fediverse which means that other ActivityPub software essentially has to use Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub with whatever quirks might exist in Mastodon. But that's still way less power than BlueSky has in the AtProto ecosystem.
Open protocols are only good as long as there's enough reason for lots of different parties to keep those lines of communication open. mastodon.social needs to keep supporting ActivityPub because they'd lose 85% of their network if they stopped. Let's say it's 2030 and AtProto has 500M users and 99% of them are using BlueSky. BlueSky could simply turn off all the AtProto endpoints and make their web and mobile apps use proprietary endpoints. I'm not saying they'd do that, but they certainly could. Now, if 2030 comes around and there are 500M AtProto users and 10% of them are on BlueSky, then it wouldn't really be possible for BlueSky to turn off AtProto. They'd lose 90% of their network.
But we don't know if AtProto will catch on outside of BlueSky or if BlueSky will remain the vast majority of the network. If there isn't a lot of use outside of BlueSky, there could come a day when it's very tempting to turn it off - or do something that isn't quite turning it off, but would effectively accomplish it. Maybe they just start making breaking changes to AtProto, rolling it out, and documenting the change a week later and third parties just end up unreliable and people migrate off them. There's lots of options.
Five years from now, how is BlueSky making money? Are they just storing, processing, and serving lots of content without good monetization as third party apps start grabbing users and making money off their servers? I mean, we saw what Reddit and Twitter did. If BlueSky controls 99% of AtProto users, they can turn the firehose off. Even if they aren't trying to be evil or maximize their revenue, at some point they need money for all those engineers and servers. Maybe the official BlueSky app will be popular enough for them to get some ad revenue there and not feel the need to go after third party apps. Maybe a lot of things.
But until BlueSky is a minority of AtProto users/posts/etc., it's still something they have a lot of power over - including the power to pivot BlueSky off AtProto and make BlueSky a proprietary network.
Time will tell!
(https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)
They have been a bit vague about other ways to generate revenue, except in one case: they will not be using advertisements to monetize.
They better have a good answer to this because it's a threat to the ecosystem as a whole if they don't. Because relying on VC money in this environment is not the smartest thing to do.
I agree that a healthy Bluesky PBLLC is a good thing, and hope they manage to pull it off. Time will tell.
Because based on them raising $8m in a seed round middle of last year they aren't going to have much time to decide and implement a strategy before they will need to start thinking about raising a Series A. Or maybe Jack does become a bigger investor.
Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out advertising.
I also don't believe (and again, don't work there, just a huge fan, so maybe this is wrong) I'm not sure that the revenue was the reason for shipping this feature. It's best thought of as an accessibility feature, for folks who do not know what a "DNS record" is and have never hosted a domain. Without this, more technical users get something special that non-technical users do not: a nicer username. The money is just a side effect of the fact that purchasing a domain name already requires money, and so a partnership with a revenue split just makes sense.
> Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out advertising.
I hear you in an abstract "that's the way you make money in this space" sense, but I also think it's a smart reaction to the public sentiment around this stuff. People do not like advertising. It is a differentiator. We'll see if it works out for them or not.
Well,
> Are you thinking about advertisements at all?
>
> There will always be free options, and we can't enshittify the network with ads. This is where federation comes in. The fact that anyone can self-host and anyone can build on the software means that we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave.
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-ensh...
This reads as definitive to me personally.
> we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave
Neither of those is the same as "no ads". They're just saying that they can't make the ads so bad that most people want to leave, because then people will leave and the ads won't be shown to anyone.
Bluesky doesn't have the ability to do this. There's no API key to revoke that could stop someone else from running parallel apps/infrastructure/etc. The network is completely open.
I'm about as anti-ads as it gets but I don't object to other people using apps with ads in them, if that's their choice.