Editor’s note: Mike Masnick is on the board of Bluesky, and took no part in editing or reviewing this piece.
Here it is: the dumbest take to date on Bluesky v. xTwitter. There’s been plenty of stupid offered up before by bitter xTwitter users who are trying to pretend they’re not still splashing around in white nationalist dumpster juice while surrounded by bots. Their favorite coping method is to claim Bluesky users are afraid to engage in the marketplace of ideas. But all they offer is a limited market in the darkest alley in town.
None of these arguments are being made in good faith. No one criticizing Bluesky users for routinely rousting Nazis and their fans from this social media platform is making intellectually honest arguments. They’re just bitter that the people they actively dislike (and actively harassed on xTwitter) are no longer willing to slog through the sewage just to have a meaningful interaction or two with their fellow, non-bigoted human beings.
When Bluesky opened to the wider public in 2023, more left-leaning users flooded in, many of them hoping to escape the increased visibility of conservative views on Musk’s now laissez-faire platform redubbed “X.”
I mean, it’s right there. This is yet another person who thinks people are closed-minded because they prefer not to engage with “conservative views,” while failing to acknowledge that “conservative views” is a coded term that refers to open racism, white nationalist ideology, anti-trans hatred, bigoted beliefs covering pretty much every race, color, creed, or sexuality, and a general enthusiasm for MAGA-based autocracy.
These are not “conservative views.” These are bigoted views that far too many people hold — people who think they might be perceived as rational if they use this phrase, rather than something more specific that would reveal what these “views” actually are.
The bad faith argument continues, broad-brushing Bluesky users as liberal elites, skeeting from the relative safety of their ivory towers in the general direction of the internet’s peasantry.
Having emerged from the intersectional hothouses of academia, many progressives today view policy disputes through a therapeutic lens: They see themselves—and the marginalized groups they claim to speak for—as victims of trauma. The solution to that trauma is not rigorous debate. Quite the opposite; they need protection. Exposure to dangerous speech could threaten their mental stability. So progressives now treat opposing ideas not as errors that need to be rebutted with facts, but as dangerous contagions that must be quarantined.
Bro, there has been actual trauma inflicted by social media users. It happens on every social media platform, but Bluesky’s robust moderation tools (many of which are controlled by users themselves) — including a Block button that actually works — do offer protection to people who’d rather have a pleasant online experience, rather than one routinely interrupted by harassment from ugly trolls and outright bigots who seem to feel the “marketplace of ideas” obligates the harassed to indefinitely endure harassment.
At least Meigs says there’s some “dangerous speech” out there. That he won’t equate it to the “conservative views” he name-checked earlier is disingenuous. The entry fee for social media interaction should never be subjecting yourself to bigotry and hatred. If the bigots want a playground, they’ve got several to choose from. This just sounds like the whining of bullies who are finding fewer and fewer people to push around.
After a diversion into a bunch of stuff that’s so barely worth discussing even Meigs can’t be bothered to do it any length (and that’s in an op-ed that runs more than 2,400 words) — de-platforming, Biden Adminstration allegedly demanding accounts be blocked or removed, COVID origin conspiracy theories, the banning of Trump from Twitter after the January 6th insurrection) — he goes right back into pretending xTwitter is the only place real social media interaction still takes place. And, of course, he uses phrasing that glosses over the irredeemable shithole xTwitter has become under Musk’s ownership:
When Bluesky gave them an escape hatch from the increasingly freewheeling—and sometimes raucous—debates on X, many jumped through it without looking back.
Oh yeah. “Freewheeling.” “Raucous.” Those are some mighty fine words. But they don’t fool anyone who isn’t already deep in the throes of self-delusion. There’s no “debate” on xTwitter. What’s being referred to as freewheeling, raucous debate is just a steady stream of open racism, transphobia, sexual harassment, death/rape threats, and a bunch of dudes with philosopher bust avatars declaring that everyone calling them bigots are just low-IQ liberal NPCs. And that’s if you can even get past the massive ad load, Bitcoin hucksters, and emoji-laden responses that clutter every single thread on the platform.
There’s more of this throughout the rest of it. The guy speaking on behalf of his fellow “conservatives” continues to proclaim Bluesky is the platform of intolerance and fragility — again, using phrases that refuse to acknowledge the genuine ugliness that is the day-to-day business of xTwitter.
I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.
[…]
I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals.
“Right-wing views.” Hate in scare-quotes. “Somewhat uglier vibe.” But who’s really threatened here? It seems to be the “right-wing view” people who are running into a wall of resistance that’s no longer going to engage in the mutual lie of “freewheeling debate.” These are the same people whose “conservative views” make them angry about preferred pronouns, sexual identity, diversity, inclusion, women having personal agency, and any flag that doesn’t have a thin blue line, MAGA logo, or swastika on it.
Once again, Meigs goes back to his core complaint: Bluesky users don’t want our “conservative views” bullshit wrecking up their mostly-pleasant Bluesky experience. And, in doing so, Meigs accidentally advertises what makes Bluesky better than its competitors.
I quickly learned that the site’s core innovation is not finding ways to facilitate thoughtful conversations. Instead, Bluesky’s secret sauce is the powerful tools it gives users to shut down voices they disagree with. Block lists—featuring the names of people you will not permit to see your posts—are public and widely shared and discussed. “People make nasty lists and lists and lists there,” a Bluesky user in Germany explained to me. Many Bluesky regulars import other users’ lists wholesale, allowing them to block hundreds of people they’ve never even heard of.
That’s the real problem Meigs has with Bluesky: it won’t give him a platform to harangue people whose ideas he disagrees with. That’s always been the case, even back when “conservatives” were complaining about being muted, blocked, or banned from (original) Twitter and Facebook. They all carry the same sense of entitlement: a firm belief that if they’ve been given a platform to speak, everyone else should be forced to listen.
And this follow-up makes it clear Meigs is willfully ignoring what has already happened on xTwitter to pretend this is a uniquely Bluesky problem:
In real-world social circles, being a total flaming, um, jerk brings social costs. But in a hermetically sealed social-media bubble, it’s a way to build your status. Bluesky adds another perverse incentive: Anyone adding nuance or pushing back against violent statements risks being ridiculed and even mass-blocked by the online community. This combination of positive and negative rewards creates a one-way ratchet, always pushing users toward extremism.
Exactly. But you only like the bubble that includes you, rather than the one that doesn’t. That’s a pretty universal human trait — resentment towards any group that excludes you. Unfortunately, it’s also a pretty human trait to spend 2,400+ words trying to turn your personal bad experience with Bluesky (if this ever even happened — there doesn’t appear to be an account linked to Meigs on the service at the moment) into a universal experience that reflects a vast majority of internet users.
What’s never even considered in this column is that people are embracing Bluesky for all the reasons you’ve chosen to treat as negatives. Everyone can curate their own experience — something that’s definitely not possible anywhere else. Both Facebook and xTwitter allow pay-to-play amplification for posts, as well as sloppy, profit-first algorithms that shove whatever these sites think will increase “engagement,” rather than assist in curation by being more attentive to what users actually want to see on their timelines. What’s absolutely insane about Meigs’ assertions above is that he’s ignoring his own complaints about xTwitter so he can pretend the real problem here is Bluesky:
If you can’t see the embed, it’s a screenshot of Meigs on xTwitter in 2019 saying:
Twitter’s goal with every change is to have us spend less time doing what WE want to (interact with the people we actually follow) and spend more time doing what Twitter wants them to do (get sucked into “trends” and #StupidHastags and viral outrage mobs).
Here’s a platform that doesn’t pull that bullshit. And Meigs shits on it because “conservative views” (you know the ones…) aren’t gaining a foothold at Bluesky.
I’m a Bluesky user. I don’t mind honest debates. But I’d much rather have a timeline I can closely control — one that gives me access to what I’m looking for and allows me to remove any detritus I come across with a couple of swift clicks — than whatever’s passing itself as “social media” elsewhere.
What’s on display here is the amazing fragility of people who can dish out tons of abuse but just can’t take it. It’s also exposing the people who are facing the uncomfortable fact that lots of internet users don’t like what they post or the people they identify with. Worse, they’re finding out they don’t like they people they identify with much either. Echo chambers aren’t great, but I’m sure people would prefer an echo chamber where most people are polite, helpful, and supportive, rather than the alternative xTwitter provides: a dark pit filled with the worst people you know. Meigs, for some reason, prefers the pit. At least there, he can soak in some tepid applause for owning the liberal snowflakes currently enjoying a site he doesn’t feel obliged to listen to him speak.
When 1,700 people pack a room at SXSW (with hundreds more relegated to overflow spaces) to hear about a decentralized social media protocol, it’s clear something interesting is happening. The crowd that showed up for my conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week wasn’t just there for another social media platform — they were there because they’re hungry for an alternative to billionaire-controlled (and manipulated) digital spaces.
As a reminder, I’m on the board at Bluesky, so I’m biased. However, I did try to ask Jay many of the questions I frequently hear about Bluesky, including why it’s different than other social media companies, how it thinks about content moderation and toxicity, and whether or not it’s really “billionaire proof” as the company claims (I prefer “billionaire resistant.”)
The full video and audio are both online if you want to listen.
The crux of the argument for Bluesky — and the whole reason I proposed the idea that later became Bluesky — was exactly this: to give more choice to everyone. To push the power to the ends of the network, rather than hoarding it in the middle where it can be used to manipulate and control. As Jay notes during the talk, it’s about giving everyone the ability to “choose your own adventure” on social media, enabling more pro-social outcomes.
This isn’t just theoretical anymore. While major platforms continue their descent into “enshittification,” Bluesky is demonstrating that there’s a real appetite for putting user choice and empowerment first. The millions of people already using the service aren’t just passive consumers — they’re actively engaging with and building upon the underlying ATprotocol, creating new experiences and tools without asking anyone’s permission, and without being controlled by anyone.
And while there’s still a ways to go to get fully to that point, I think that Jay and her team have made amazing strides towards that vision, and we’re seeing lots of other efforts to build towards that vision as well — exactly the kind of permissionless innovation the ATprotocol was designed to enable.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Resolver, the leading provider of risk intelligence and advisory services. In our Bonus Chat, Karley Chadwick, head of platform Trust and Safety Delivery at Resolver, talks about emerging safety trends in gaming and augmented reality and reflects on her experience as a threat analyst.
If you’re in London on Thursday 27th March, join Ben, Mark Scott (Digital Politics) and Georgia Iacovou (Horrific/Terrific) for an evening of tech policy, discussion and drinks. Register your interest.
Disclosure:I’m onthe board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosystems.
The internet was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it’s left us feeling helpless, waiting for billionaires, governments, and tech giants to save us.
The most insidious thing about Big Tech’s takeover of the internet isn’t the concentration of power—it’s how it’s trained us to beg for scraps from our digital overlords.
Every week brings a new chorus of voices demanding that [insert tech giant] must “do better” or that [insert government agency] needs to “crack down” or that [insert billionaire] should swoop in to save us. We’ve become digital peasants, petitioning various lords and kings to please, please fix the internet for us.
This learned helplessness isn’t just pathetic—it’s exactly what the tech giants want. The more we believe we need them to solve our problems, the more power they accumulate.
For a generation now, too many people have grown accustomed to the idea that the internet is just four big companies and a few others on the periphery, rather than its original promise of something that empowered users to control their own experiences.
And while I’ve been largely critical of the larger “techlash” narrative, it’s mainly because most of the “solutions” people were presenting were taking us further and further away from the world that the original internet promised us.
Almost every proposed solution I’ve seen to the “techlash” has been to effectively give the very same tech companies more power, but along with a demand that they somehow wave a magic wand and “fix” the big problems (which often represent larger societal issues).
This mindset has left us with what many believe to be only three possible saviors: the government with its regulatory power, the companies themselves under public pressure, or some “benevolent” billionaire riding in to take control. As Renee DiResta aptly described in a recent article, this reduces all attempts at change to “working the refs”—hoping that if we yell loud enough at these powers-that-be, they’ll grant us the changes we want.
But that seems like a horrible way to handle governance issues, and one that really isn’t just unsustainable, but deeply disempowering to users. We need a world in which users themselves are empowered to create and enable the actual changes they want to see.
Want to see this learned helplessness in action? When Elon Musk (whose supporters celebrated his Twitter takeover as their billionaire savior) started attacking Wikipedia, the response from some was predictable: “We need a friendly billionaire to protect Wikipedia!”
The irony here is staggering. Wikipedia—perhaps the internet’s greatest example of user empowerment and collaborative creation—supposedly needs a billionaire guardian angel? This is exactly the kind of learned helplessness that’s poisoning our relationship with the internet. Instead of recognizing that Wikipedia’s strength comes from its community and distributed governance model, people instinctively reach for another top-down savior.
Think about just how fucked up that is.
The whole promise of the internet (and, arguably the promise of democracy) was that it was supposed to be about devolving power to the people at the ends of the network, rather than centralized authoritarian control.
We should be able to “save us” rather than demanding that some authority do it for us.
This is why I originally wrote my “Protocols Not Platforms” paper, as an attempt to remind people that the whole point of the internet was to put the power back in the hands of users over the large entities.
Because I feared that this opportunity was rapidly slipping away. If we grant the premise that the only way to deal with harms or problems online is to give more power and more control to large centralized entities, and policy changes are driven by who can “work the refs” the best, we end up locking ourselves in to that world that deprives individuals of their own agency, and greatly empowers authoritarian control.
And even if that authoritarian control may be benevolent now, that can change in a heartbeat. That’s true of companies and billionaires (often effectively the same thing) but also is true of passing all this off on government regulations (which, these days, is increasingly also looking like a representative of company and billionaire interests anyway).
Let’s be clear: smart regulation has its place. We desperately need CFAA reform, actual privacy protections, and an overhaul of our broken patent system. We need reforms that allow companies to focus on more than just investors’ short-term goals for growth. But there’s a crucial distinction between regulations that empower users and those that simply deputize Big Tech as government-approved gatekeepers.
Look at how most “tech regulation” plays out in reality: complex compliance requirements that only the biggest players can afford to implement. Mandatory filtering systems that only the giants have the resources to build. Content moderation rules that entrench existing platforms while blocking new entrants. Theatrical but ineffective privacy laws that simply require large companies to collect more data, and are impossible for smaller players to follow. The end result? A cozy government-corporate partnership that leaves users more powerless than ever.
We all saw the tech oligarchs lined up behind Donald Trump at the inauguration. Any plan that involves having any of them “saving” or “fixing” the internet is not going to lead to good results. It’s just going to lead to more power for the powerful, and less for the rest of us.
Instead, we need to look for more ways for users to empower themselves and to get out of this state of learned helplessness and demanding some more powerful entity “fix” everything that goes wrong.
I’m obviously biased, but this is where I think that projects like Bluesky and the ATprotocol are so important. It (in part) came out of my paper which was all about empowering the user, but I’ve been seeing an unfortunate set of demands from users again focusing on the same learned helplessness. They don’t like a particular company decision, which is an understandable position to take, but rather than making use of the affordances of the system to help deal with that problem, they demand that some centralized authority must come in and fix it for them.
There are certain categories of harms for which there needs to be some element of top-down enforcement, but people have become so accustomed to relying on such top-down enforcement for everything that they sometimes seem unwilling to consider that maybe they can take care of some of these problems themselves.
That includes embracing and using these kinds of decentralized tools that give more power to the end-users (and which are technologically resistant to takeovers from evil billionaires). But we need to do more to surface those affordances and powers to end users.
It’s no surprise that the “working the refs” approach to seeking change is so prevalent. For most people, that was really the only option for seeking change from these internet giants who really had a form of extreme power and control over the systems and their users.
But it’s important for users to recognize that it doesn’t need to be this way, and that a new generation of tools and services can be (and are being) built that allows them to have much more control and say over their own data, their own experience, and their own environment.
Here’s where projects like Bluesky come in. Yes, at first glance, it looks like just another Twitter clone. But that’s just there to make users comfortable using it. Beneath that familiar surface lies something revolutionary: actual user control. Want strict moderation of health misinformation but a lighter touch on political speech? Done. Prefer to delegate content filtering to specific communities or experts you trust? That’s built in. The interface feels familiar, but the power dynamics are completely different.
And that’s just the beginning. As the platform matures, users can take even more control by self-hosting their own Personal Data Servers (PDS) or connecting through independent relays (not yet there but coming soon). This isn’t just tweaking settings within a corporate walled garden—it’s genuine digital sovereignty.
Will every user want this level of control? Of course not. But the point is that it’s possible, it’s built into the system’s DNA, and it creates an escape hatch from corporate control that simply doesn’t exist on traditional platforms.
These are all things that are coming and will be possible, but it’s going to be important for these options to be not just available but easy to understand and use. User empowerment is a different kind of muscle for users, that many will need to learn about (or relearn about), and help will be needed along the way.
But it’s also another reason why embracing platforms like Bluesky and the underlying ATprotocol are so important (and yes, this also applies to things like ActivityPub, and other decentralized alternatives like nostr or Farcaster). It’s setting ourselves up for greater empowerment and control over our own digital lives, rather than having to rely on “working the refs” in government, in companies, or among a small group of billionaire oligarchs. We can’t expect any of those three to “save us” from poor decisions.
We need to stop waiting for saviors and start saving the internet ourselves.
If you’re in London on Thursday 30th January, join Ben, Mark Scott (Digital Politics) and Georgia Iacovou (Horrific/Terrific) for an evening of tech policy, discussion and drinks. Register your interest.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Disclosure:I’m onthe board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky.
There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how decentralized it really is. There has also been a growing fear that “enshittification is inevitable.” Or, worse, that an “evil billionaire” might take it over and ruin it the way other platforms have been ruined.
But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.
Last week, a group called Free Our Feeds announced itself to the world and kicked off a crowdfunding process to effectively build a Bluesky competitor, built on the same ATprotocol and fully interoperable with Bluesky, but wholly separate from the app.
This is both exciting and fantastic, in part because it’s cool, and in part because it demonstrates the real-world impact and importance of ATprotocol’s open design, showing how it enables the creation of alternative infrastructure that can prevent lock-in and empower users.
The Enshittification Fear:
For a few years now, Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” has been a hot topic in tech circles, with many worried that even the most well-intentioned platforms are doomed to become terrible over time.
Indeed, just a few months ago, Cory wrote a thoughtful piece about why he was not joining Bluesky and why he feared it was on the path to enshittification. He and I had actually discussed all of this much earlier (very early in Bluesky’s history) and I suggested to him that Bluesky had some tricks up its sleeve to be enshittification-resistant. In the piece, Cory says some very nice things about me before (correctly!) saying that even though he trusts me deeply, he doesn’t think that his trust of me (and me being on Bluesky’s board) means Bluesky is immune to the enshittification curve:
Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her. At least one of the board members there, Mike Masnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don’t agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.
But even the best boards can make bad calls.
And he’s correct. The best boards can make bad calls. And I can certainly make bad calls.
But the secret behind Bluesky was not that it has an amazing CEO or a non-evil board. It’s that it was built from the ground up with a focus on forced openness and a protocol on which anyone could build. I discussed this in great detail a few months ago on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast.
The key points:
Nothing can be enshittification-proof, but you can make things enshittification resistant.
The key to doing so is building on a forced-open protocol, such that if people hate what you’re doing, they’re able to rebuild any part of the infrastructure and cut out the entity engaged in enshittification.
Even if the alternative competing services don’t exist, the simple fact that the option is there for people to keep their content, keep their relationships, keep their ability to communicate while avoiding any particular platform, is a very strong incentive to resist enshittification.
This is because even the looming possibility that someone can come in, piggyback on the existing network, but with their own infrastructure, creates incredibly strong incentives for any player in the space to avoid giving reasons to people to leave.
Going back to Cory’s original formulation of “enshittification,” I can explain this further:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
In traditional, centralized systems that shift away from being good to users to being good to their business customers is where the slide begins. For traditional companies, though, they can get away with it, because users are “stuck.” As Cory well knows from his work on adversarial interoperability, the real problem is lock-in.
Once a platform has you, it can start to squeeze you if you have nowhere else to go. And, in the case of social media, that’s particularly tricky, because you want to be where your social graph is, so once you’ve really built up connections, a platform has you.
But if the network is based on an open protocol, in which alternative infrastructure can be built, then any player in the system has a greatly diminished incentive to start being bad to users in favor of other constituents, because the worse you get for users, the more opportunity there is for someone else to jump in and offer something better.
I think that many people, though not necessarily Cory, have zeroed in on the idea of “VC funding” as the root cause of enshittification, rather than the lock-in. And it is true that some VCs might be looking to invest only in centralized platforms that have built-in lock-in, but it’s possible to recognize an alternative approach to building a sustainable business: by treating users well, allowing everyone to build on the same open network, and recognizing that this makes the whole system more valuable to everyone.
That’s what Bluesky is trying to do with the ATprotocol.
The company has said from the beginning that “Bluesky” itself is just a reference app, and the point is for others to build. Indeed, part of the company’s own mission is that “the company is a future adversary.”
As Cory notes, no CEO or board can protect against that. But building an open network that enables third parties to build every bit of the stack as alternatives does help protect against that.
Free Our Feeds!
And now it’s happening. With the launch of Free Our Feeds, which is running a crowdfunding project and looking to raise $30 million over the next three years, we’re seeing that fully independent infrastructure on the path to being built. And hopefully they won’t be the only ones.
The plan is to build entirely separate infrastructure, but all using the ATprotocol, so that anyone on Bluesky (or other ATproto services) can interoperate with the new service.
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
This isn’t just about bolstering one new social media platform. Our vision offers a pathway to an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any company or billionaire.
And, notably, among the names signed on to support it is Cory Doctorow, which is exciting to see.
This ability to build alternative infrastructure is possible (despite Cory’s fears in his piece), it just takes resources. Cory talked about the lack of “federation” in his piece, suggesting that Bluesky had somehow failed to “federate”:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
And while it is true that Bluesky is, currently, the only source for some aspects of the ATprotocol stack, it has been built so that the other parts can be replicated elsewhere. Admittedly, some of it is more complicated than other parts, but it is possible.
And that’s what the new Free Our Feeds effort is trying to do.
So while Cory was worried that this was something Bluesky had refused to do, the reality is that the possibility of doing this has been there for a while. The problem is that it’s not simple. And it needed someone else to come along and build what was open for them to build.
Because if Bluesky built it itself, then it’s not a third party that is independent. It’s still Bluesky. And that’s why Free Our Feeds is so exciting. They’re proving that a third party can build out a system entirely independent of Bluesky, the company. And, admittedly, building the full stack is not cheap, which explains why Free Our Feeds is working towards an ambitious funding goal.
The ability for a third party like Free Our Feeds to build an entirely separate system while still allowing users to communicate across apps is the key to ATprotocol’s “technological poison pill” effect. Even if Bluesky or another provider tries to act against users’ interests, people can seamlessly shift to an alternative without losing access to their social graph and data. This creates a powerful counterweight to the usual lock-in and network effects that enable enshittification.
The Company is a Future Adversary
And this is where it’s important to understand some of the fundamental differences in how something like Bluesky/ATproto works and something like Mastodon/ActivityPub work. They have a slightly different approach to trying to tackle the same problem. Each are trying to create decentralized, protocol-based social media tools, but they take a fundamentally different approach.
ActivityPub works on the theory that almost anyone can effectively build and host “their own” mini-Twitter-like service. And then that mini-Twitter can speak to many of the other mini-Twitters, with the ability of any of them to “defederate” (or block all communications) with other mini-Twitters, as needed.
That defederation aspect is a unique (and fascinating!) kind of incentivizing tool, as platforms that want to be good neighbors have incentives to police their own mini-Twitters. But it also creates some challenges. It’s tough to run your own mini-Twitter, especially if you allow more than just yourself to use it. There’s a fair bit of work involved. And then managing users, managing which servers you defederate from, etc., is a chore.
The ATProtocol approach is somewhat different. You can federate some aspects of things, such as hosting all your own data on your own PDS or Personal Data Server (which is great, as it means you have full control over your data, not Bluesky or anyone else), but it’s not designed for a random individual to spin up an entire mini-Twitter.
The philosophy is more that different parts of the stack may require different players to be involved, and some of them may require more resources than others. Running your own PDS is relatively inexpensive and easy. Running your own relay is more challenging and expensive but wouldn’t necessarily need a corporation. Other pieces require more, and that’s what Free Our Feeds appears to be building.
And, again, the most important bit is that this is always possible on this network. Because “the company is a future adversary.”
Bluesky’s approach directly addresses the enshittification fear by ensuring that no single entity, not even Bluesky itself, can gain too much control over the network. The open protocol acts as a check on any potential abuse of power.
The fact that Free Our Feeds can do this in the first place is almost more important than whether or not they actually succeed (which I hope they do!), because it creates strong incentives for Bluesky, the corporate entity, not to enshittify.
Indeed, if you look back at the history of Twitter, in the early days, it encouraged open development and building, but it wasn’t a protocol where the entire stack could be recreated. And, when one entity started buying up many of the independent developers with a pretty explicit plan to “steal away” all of Twitter’s users, Twitter started locking stuff up and blocking that ability, because there wasn’t an open protocol and there wasn’t any possibility of rebuilding certain parts of the infrastructure.
In contrast, Bluesky was built from the ground up for this very thing. And you can see that difference in how the Bluesky team has reacted to Free Our Feeds: many employees, including top management, are cheering on the Free Our Feeds team even as, ostensibly, they’re building “a competitor.”
Exciting to see new, independent projects spin up to decentralize the atproto ecosystem! Building alternative infrastructure is a big step towards giving users more choice and making the network billionaire-proof.
Free Our Feeds! What is it! @freeourfeeds.comF.O.F. is an independent group with the goal of running THIS👇 social network totally outside of Bluesky.It's not us. It's a fully independent version of the network. All the same users and posts. Running cooperatively with us and others.
very excited to have other large players taking the decentralization of atproto infrastructure seriouslylooking forward to seeing what comes out of this!
This sincere welcoming of potential “competitors” is practically unheard of in the tech world. But it reflects a fundamentally different mindset enforced by the open protocol, one focused on growing the pie for everyone rather than jealously guarding a slice. It’s a recognition that, in a world of open protocols, a rising tide can lift all boats.
Of course, some may argue that the technical complexity and costs involved in building out alternative infrastructure will still limit how many can truly compete with dominant players, even with an open protocol. And that’s a fair point. Spinning up a full social media stack is no trivial task, as the $30 million Free Our Feeds campaign underscores.
But the key is that it’s possible, and that possibility acts as a check on bad behavior. Moreover, as a robust ecosystem emerges around the protocol, we can expect to see more tools and services that lower the barriers to entry. Already, the rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATProtocol hint at a future where a vibrant alternative tech scene, with empowered users, can thrive.
It’s a recognition that, in the networked world, this can be a non-zero-sum situation, and having more players building makes it better for everyone. It also allows for different kinds of experiments, which will create more features that more people are interested in. It’s an approach that is focused on making sure the whole ecosystem grows, rather than one company’s fiefdom.
Get Busy Building
Along those lines, there’s been a lot more development going on elsewhere as well, which is equally exciting. In just the last week, there’s been talk of independent developers building an Instagram competitor and a TikTok competitor on ATprotocol. That last one, by the way, was built in just a few hours. That’s what can happen when you have an open system. Over the weekend, Bluesky itself added to this by soft launching a new view that gives the service a TikTok-like feel. But, again, in an open way such that others can build algorithms and feeds for a similar video-only feed.
Similarly, Flipboard recently released an amazingly slick brand new app, called Surf, that works with both ATprotocol and ActivityPub (and RSS!!) to create a very cool tool for browsing, consuming, sharing, and creating posts across all of these networks. And last week, right after the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban, Flipboard’s CEO/co-founder Mike McCue showed off SkyTok, a quickly created feed (using Surf) that creates a simple TikTok-like experience. And, over the weekend, they tested SkyTok with Bluesky’s new video rendering setup as well.
And people are taking notice. Famed entrepreneur/investor Mark Cuban put out a call for proposals, saying he’d like to fund a TikTok competitor built on ATProtocol, so I imagine the links above won’t be the only examples of people building cool stuff.
Most of these alternative apps are really building different looks at Bluesky’s implementation of ATprotocol, rather than a fully independent stack. Think of it as services that build on-top of Gmail. But that’s also why the Free Our Feeds effort is so cool. It’s like someone is coming along and building an Outlook to compete with Gmail. And, assuming they’re successful, these alternative apps (like the TikTok-style apps) should be able to easily work with it as well. Or any other third party that builds out the infrastructure.
This is a case where the more people building on this open protocol and open network, the more it helps everyone.
And, it does so in a way that is still easy for people to use. Most users don’t need to know any of this is happening, or about ATprotocol in the background. It’s just creating the kind of more open web that we all need, without the lock-in.
Again, it’s that lock-in that creates the eventual enshittification. Without lock-in, any app could still enshittify, but the risks for that app would be much bigger, because it’s so easy for users to exit. It won’t be like leaving Twitter for Bluesky where you are effectively “starting over,” it will basically be “Oh, I don’t like how Bluesky is acting, so I’m just switching over to the Free Our Feeds system” where… you don’t lose any of your posts (they’re in your own PDS), you don’t lose any of your connections (your social graph is really yours), and you remain in full control.
This is what the early internet promised us, but it got lost in the early 2000s when big companies came along and effectively colonized open protocols (or recreated them as closed silos with nicer user interfaces). This time around, though, people are learning to create user-friendly interfaces with open protocols.
From Ulysses Pacts to Technological Poison Pills
In Cory’s piece, he talks about the concept of the Ulysses Pact, which is what he requires of any new service:
There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact.
He argued that Bluesky didn’t have that because it hadn’t “federated.” But it had. It had locked the protocol open so that anyone could build. And now they are.
I think a better way of thinking about this isn’t the “Ulysses Pact,” but rather a technological poison pill. I had seen some people saying on Bluesky that the company needed to create some sort of “poison pill” in its financial setup to ward off evil potential buyers who might “make an offer they can’t refuse.”
But what Bluesky has done with ATproto is even better: it’s not relying on some financial contract. It’s created a technological poison pill, such that even if Bluesky (the company) was offered a deal it couldn’t refuse, others could just rebuild the stack… outside of Bluesky’s control (but where users could continue to communicate with each other), and Bluesky could do nothing to stop them.
Beyond enabling the “easy exit” Cory wants, it also acts to ward off “evil billionaires,” because as soon as they act evil, the poison pill is there to give everyone an escape route, thereby effectively destroying any evil billionaire’s plans. An evil billionaire has less reason to be evil in the first place since alternatives can spring up and users can exit without cost.
The “Ulysses Pact” here is in the setup. Evil billionaires and enshittification become self-defeating, thanks to the poison pill. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Because you never know what bad decisions some future version (future adversary) might make. But the nature of the locked open protocol means that it’s much easier to deal with that, and that simple fact should hopefully disincentivize any attempts in the first place.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect individual users; it has the potential to reshape the fundamental dynamics of the social web. By reducing the power of walled gardens and returning control to users, an ecosystem of open protocols could realign the incentives of technology companies, ensuring that they prioritize serving their users’ interests to remain competitive. It would mark a major shift back towards the original decentralized vision of the internet.
The rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATprotocol are not just exciting for their own sake. They hint at a future where a vibrant ecosystem of interoperable “small tech” can thrive, with a diverse range of user-centric services emerging to meet different needs. Rather than being limited to a handful of monolithic platforms, internet users could enjoy a rich marketplace of apps and services, all built on shared open standards.
That’s the vision I had with my Protocols, not Platforms paper, and now it’s on its way to being truly real. Having the Free Our Feeds folks jump in is not just proof that this is possible, it’s a vote of confidence for the overall setup, and shows how we can actually build enshittification-resistant systems by locking them open as a technological poison pill against lock-in and against the threats of evil billionaires.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect users; it will fundamentally reshape the dynamics of the social web. It will bring us back towards the original promise of the open web where users are in control, rather than giant companies. Companies will still have a place, but the job of platforms will be to serve the users’ best interests first and foremost.
In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by guest host David Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership. They cover:
It’s been a few weeks, but we’re back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we’ve got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today’s. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for a far-reaching interview about (among other things) the history of BestNetTech, the future of Bluesky, and the origins of the Streisand Effect. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.
But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.
I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:
As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:
What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.
At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.
Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.
Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”
But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.
The more I dig into Bluesky, and more importantly the AT Protocol, the more I get that feeling I had when I first got involved with the Kubernetes project.
But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.
Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.
The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.
As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.
Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.
In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.
The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.
I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.
Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.
I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.
