Another interesting idea is Bluesky’s version of verification. Instead of having company employees perform the verification, users can include their web domain in their username to indicate that they are trusted. For example, if a user has the .gov tag, you can be sure they are not an impostor impersonating Nancy Pelosi. Graber says about a quarter of the US Senate uses Bluesky.
Graber also understands that most people use products as they find them, with little patience for tweaking the system: “Our goal is to give everyone a good experience by default, because we know that users don’t want to reach out and to find a control panel full of switches,” he says.
A big fan of Bluesky is Michael Masnick, the founding journalist of Techdirt. It’s no surprise, because it was his 2019 article—Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech—that led then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to start Bluesky as an internal project. After Musk’s acquisition, Bluesky became independent, and Dorsey has nothing to do with it. Masnick recently joined Bluesky’s board, but when we spoke with him he stressed that he was speaking on his behalf and not that of the company. He’s impressed by the way Bluesky’s team has applied the conceptual framework he originally outlined: “Jay has really thought about the difficult decisions that have to be made if you want to do this right,” he says. “Most users don’t care [la filosofía subyacente]”They just want something that works,” he says. But the philosophy, he argues, is important for its long-term viability: keeping it a place that is good for the community, and not another opportunity for greedy overlords to squeeze its users.
As Bluesky grows, the challenges become more complicated. How does Graber expect to not screw up? Their answer is that, indeed, the best way to retain users is to allow them to leave and take their network with them. If they’re fed up with Bluesky, they can pick it up and go somewhere else, taking their contacts and online activity with them. (Assuming, of course, that there are enough alternatives that also subscribe to the precepts of openness. Which is not certain.) It is an existential incentive for Bluesky to satisfy its community.
This all sounds very good. But it’s also a thumb in the eye of recent history. The big social networks never set out to be so toxic, they simply happenedas a consequence of following money. (Graber says that Bluesky, which is a public benefit company, is built to resist such temptations even though it is funded by venture capitalists, who by definition are in it for the money: “The venture capitalists we’ve brought in are very excited about the open development ecosystem we are building and are philosophically committed to creating a new paradigm for social,” he says. “Still, I wonder if the current business plan – which involves selling tools and improved services, avoiding traditional routes of advertising and data monetization – can support a future with hundreds of millions of users. Furthermore, the main investor in the recent series A round is… a cryptocurrency company.
I haven’t deleted X, although I don’t post as much anymore or check it every few hours. I guess I still don’t know how to completely quit. But I’ve moved a lot of my briefing to Bluesky. My four-figure followers follow me as much as my six-figure community of followers on X. (Readers can mitigate this by following me at stevenlevy.bsky.social. Thank you.) I also think it would be great to see Jay Graber’s vision come true. That would mean a thriving ecosystem of equally open social platforms, with competition driving ever higher standards. But that’s a movie that’s a long way from being greenlit.
Time travel
In 2009 I wrote an article in WIRED about how the users of the then nascent Twitter were shaping it and even defining its purpose. Although company executives had ambitious goals for the service, even then some were advocating for an open system for short publications, much like the federated vision that Bluesky pursues. In that text he said:
“It’s not that Twitter lacks ambition. The magnitude of its vision was laid bare last summer when a hacker stole hundreds of confidential company documents and leaked them to TechCrunch. The key point, straight from a February 2018 strategy meeting 2009: ‘If we had a billion users, it would be the pulse of the planet’.
Considering how far Twitter has come, that bold boast is a plausible goal. (Another point from the leaked memo, ‘Are we building a new Internet?’ is a stretch.) Twitter plans to increase its international audience by reaching agreements with operators to sell phones with Twitter connectivity integrated directly into the browser or messaging functions. (This will help boost the use of Twitter in developing countries, where SMS still prevails.) The company also plans to distribute Twitter content to all connected devices, such as radios and game consoles. The pulse of the planet.
That’s why competing Internet giants are so interested in, if not obsessed with, Twitter… Google has also made suspiciously Twitter-oriented adjustments. One of them is something called PubSubHubbub, a server protocol that could instantly push new content to users, whether from a blog, Facebook, instant messenger, or Twitter. This has the potential to reduce Twitter’s uniqueness by commoditizing short bursts of information: Instead of a Twitterverse, we would have a Statussphere distributed across dozens, even hundreds, of companies.”
#Bluesky #promises #ruin
