Talking About Bluesky And Putting Power & Choice Back Into Users’ Hands At SXSW
from the a-discussion-on-protocols dept
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.
Filed Under: atprotocol, jay graber, protocols, protocols not platforms, user choice
Companies: bluesky
Comments on “Talking About Bluesky And Putting Power & Choice Back Into Users’ Hands At SXSW”
it’s clear something interesting is happening.
We do, indeed, live in interesting times.
Yeah, that was an interesting interview. You both were great.
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Also interesting to see what Mike looks like, after only reading and hearing him for so many years. But the YouTube audio sounds like a different person from the Techdirt podcast audio. Unless that’s a “choose your own audio adventure” feature? 😉
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Same old, same old
I joined BlueSky after being driven off of Mastodon by racist mysoginistic white men. Now I’ve been driven off of BlueSky by a racist mysoginistic white woman. There’s no safe place online for an African woman as long as there are white US Americans around.
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Hey Valis.
This didn’t happen.
Everyone knows you’re a China-backed troll, so maybe stop pretending you’re an African woman. You haven’t fooled anyone in all the time you’ve been here. It seems like a waste of whatever trolling you’re doing, because it’s just not even remotely effective.
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China doesn’t exist. There is only Taiwan and West Taiwan.
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You keep using those words. I don’t think they mean what you think they mean.
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Taiwan is a country.
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Do you get paid for this? If so, it’s too much considering how bad you are at it.
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That’s weird. I joined Bluesky and it cured my diabetes and my hair grew back and my lost dog returned with a bag full of cash in his mouth!
Sure hope it is, with all that Bain Capital VC money coming in.
No power, no choice
How is it billionaire-proof when their own enginners say you’d basically need to be a billionaire to create a new node on their federation? (They seem to suggest something in the range of millions or tens of millions per year in server costs.) How is it giving users choice when there is currently only one host to choose from?
The AT protocol is specifically designed to PREVENT a large marketplace of servers. It is designed to PREVENT competing instances and large-scale federation. Their plan seems to be that if this billionaire goes bad a different billionaire can maybe show up and bail you out. Assuming federation is still enabled at that point.
If you want a billionaire-proof network that gives users choice, what you want is ActivityPub. AT protocol seems designed to always be run by wealthy venture capitalists, as Bluesky is currently.
Source: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
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I agree, but when they say billionaire proof, they really just mean Elon and Trump proof. As long as it’s leftists billionaires it’s okay. These people weren’t complaining about Twitter when it was owned and manipulated by the left, but now that it’s owned by Elon and it’s had the rigged fact checking system replaced with something more legit (community notes), they can no longer tolerate it. They left seem to never want to leave their echo chambers for some reason.
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That’s certainly what the users want, but it’s basically the same people who created Twitter, so if you think they wouldn’t end up selling to someone like Musk again you’re as delusional as the bluesky users…but you seem to actually support Musk so I guess that was obvious!
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This is not even remotely true. Why lie?
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How is it billionaire-proof when their own enginners say you’d basically need to be a billionaire to create a new node on their federation?
Not true: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkru7pjwj22b
That’s literally one of the bsky engineers planning to set up an instance on his own.
I understand that you have bought into some lies about ATprotocol, but it would help if you educated yourself.
Bluesky will be interesting, if it doesn’t get slaughtered along with the rest of the internet.
Dumb question
I’m a serious fan of BlueSky. It has grown and developed in just the short time I’ve been using it. There is tremendous potential there. But I have a question, okay, maybe a few.
1) How do they make money?
2) Are there tools in the works for content creators to make money? (This is the biggest complaint I see online.)
3) Can they please put image downloads into a dedicated album or folder like other apps do?
I like the app, and the community, so I want them to succeed. I’ve probably posted more there in less than a year than I did in all the years on the bird app.
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As with most traditional social media, they don’t make money, they don’t really have good plans on how to make money, they’re just burning through VC funding and when it comes time to repay those loans they’ll be scrambling to find a way to extract that money from their users all at once.
And for reasons I detailed above, it’s likely there will be no alternative to switch to, no federation they have to maintain ties with. So step one will probably be to drop that pretense and isolate themselves into just another closed social network, so they can more easily impose ads and data mining onto their users.
Of course, they say they won’t. From what I can find, they say they’re going to sell blue checkmarks just like Twitter, and that this optional subscription revenue will pay for the entire platform — plus paying off the loans with the massive interest rates that most VC investors expect. And they say they aren’t going to paywall any features, they just expect huge numbers of users to pay a premium anyway for…reasons.
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Not true. Also, VC is not loans. You don’t have to repay them.
There are already third party apps and more is on the way.
This will not happen.
Bluesky has never said they would do this, so you’re simply making up nonsense.
There are no loans. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Again, you are lying. I don’t know why. Either you’re making shit up or you believed someone else who was making shit up.
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You should watch the interview in the video above, because we discuss all of that…
This would be the first sign of enshittification. There are already other services for paid content. You can link to them from your Bluesky account. If I start seeing paywalls for 300 character posts, I’m gone. Content creators deserve to get paid, but Bluesky isn’t the right platform to turn into a pay service.