(2022-04-06) Let's Talk About Bluesky

Let's talk about Bluesky. A couple of years ago, Twitter announced that they were working on a decentralized social media protocol. Shortly after that announcement, dead silence. Coincidentally, after Elon Musk buys 9.5% of Twitter (Musk Buys Twitter), Bluesky pops their head out, announces to the world that they're still alive, and finally detail what they're working on. 2022-04-06-BlueskyASelfauthenticatingSocialProtocol

First let's address the elephant in the room. It is highly unlikely anything out of Bluesky will see the light of day. Twitter makes a boat load of money being a centralized service, and they already killed their open API.

It's amazing to me how much FUD is being spread about the Fediverse in that post. Consider this backhanded insult towards Mastodon: If your ActivityPub server shuts down, you lose your identity and relationships tied to your account on that server, just like you would if Twitter shut down.

The sheer chutzpah! What Bluesky fails to mention is that witches.town, the instance in question, wasn't shut down because the administrator arbitrarily pulled the plug but because there was a user revolt.

More importantly, they could go elsewhere. Mastodon makes it dead easy to port your identity to another service. (edit: as others have pointed out, you can't port your posts – still, the data export options are still better compared to Twitter.)

But the FUD doesn't end there. Bluesky goes on: Operating at scale requires engineering for scale

Bluesky is implying that Mastodon can't handle lots of traffic. This is not the case. One of the defining features of Mastodon (and the Fediverse at large) is that it works a lot like email. Sure, if one Mastodon server goes down, that sucks – but the entirety of the federation still persists

Nevertheless, Bluesky has a point about a few things: Decentralized networks are complex.

Indeed, this is the problem with email. Currently, Google dominates email services with them pretty much acting like police.

Therein is the rub. Email is designed to be a decentralized service, yet right now, it might as well be centralized.

Yet I understand why this must be. As I pointed out today, the largest Mastodon instance has a spam and troll problem.

If this becomes a bigger problem, common Mastodon users will only trust instances with the resources to moderate at a mass scale. Those instances will be likely be run by a Google-like entity

Bluesky will have you believe that Twitter's centralization gives them an advantage

However, I think the solution is a lot more simple: add a peer-to-peer layer on top of federation. Focus less on where content comes from and instead on what it is. In other words, give content an address and let the user-operators on the network build resilient storage.

In other words, self-authentication. Bluesky themselves reach this solution:

Bluesky is saying nothing new. There's lots of distributed file systems in production, including the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). They certainly work, but the Internet at large continues to use addressing protocols at odds with this model

Will Bluesky be the project that finally ushers in a new era of distributed social media?

Since centralization continues to be Twitter's cash cow, I'm not holding my breath.