Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users.
Last month, I helped release the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which laid out a vision for technology that empowers users rather than extracting from them. The response was gratifying—people are genuinely hungry for an alternative to the current enshittification trajectory of tech. But the most common piece of feedback we got was some version of: “Okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually build this?”
It’s a fair question. Manifestos are cheap if they don’t connect to reality.
So here’s my answer, at least for anything involving social identity: build on the ATProtocol. It’s the only available system today that actually delivers on the resonant computing principles, and it’s ready to use right now.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto laid out five principles for building technology that works for people:
Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it’s used.
Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
If you’re building anything that involves users having identities, connecting with other users, or creating content that belongs to them—which describes basically every interesting app—you need infrastructure that makes these principles achievable rather than aspirational.
ATproto delivers all five.
Private and Dedicated come down to who controls your data. In the current paradigm, you’re rows in somebody else’s database, and they can do whatever they want with those rows. Dan Abramov, in his excellent explainer on open social systems, describes the problem perfectly:
The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave is to leave it behind.
On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal.
Alice can rebuild her social presence connection by connection somewhere else. Eventually she might even have the same reach as on the previous platform.
However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.
With ATproto, your data lives in your own “personal repository” (the PDS)—think of it as your own storage container on the social web. You can host it with a free service (like Bluesky), a paid provider, or on your own server. If your current host turns evil or just annoys you, you pack up and move without losing your identity, your connections, or any of your content. The protocol handles the redirection automatically.
This isn’t theoretical. People are doing it right now. The infrastructure exists. You can literally move your entire social presence from one host to another and nobody who follows you needs to update anything (or even realize that you’ve moved).
You don’t need to figure out ways to extract data from an unwilling billionaire’s silo. It’s already yours.
And that’s beneficial for developers as well. If you’re trying to build a system, setting up the identity and social connections creates all sorts of challenges (and dangerous temptations) regarding how you deal with other people’s data, and what games you might play to try to juice the numbers. But with ATproto, the incentives are aligned. Users control their own data, their own connections, and you can just provide a useful service on top of that.
Plural is baked into the architecture. Because your identity isn’t tied to any single app or platform, you can use multiple apps that all read from and write to your personal repository. Abramov explains this clearly in that same post:
Each open social app is like a CMS (content management system) for a subset of data that lives in its users’ repositories. In that sense, your personal repository serves a role akin to a Google account, a Dropbox folder, or a Git repository, with data from your different open social apps grouped under different “subfolders”.
When you make a post on Bluesky, Bluesky puts that post into your repo:
When you star a project on Tangled, Tangled puts that star into your repo:
When you create a publication on Leaflet, Leaflet puts it into your repo:
You get the idea.
Over time, your repo grows to be a collection of data from different open social apps. This data is open by default—if you wanted to look at my Bluesky posts, or Tangled stars, or Leaflet publications, you wouldn’t need to hit these applications’ APIs. You could just hit my personal repository and enumerate all of its records.
This is the opposite of how closed platforms work. You’re not locked into any single company’s vision of what social software should be. Different apps can disagree about what a “post” is—different products, different vibes—and that’s a feature, not a bug. Your identity travels with you across all of them.
Indeed, we’re seeing some really cool stuff around this lately, such as with the new standard.site lexicon for long form publishing on ATproto. It’s been adopted by Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint, with others likely to come on board as well.
Tynan Purdy, writing via the brand new Offprint (itself an ATproto app), captures the mindset shift that I think more developers need to internalize:
I have no more patience for platforms. I’m done.
Products come and go. This is a truism of the internet. Do not expect any particular service to exist forever, or you will be burned. It can be a depressing thought. So much of our lives are lived online. Communities and culture are created online. The play is performed on stages we call “social media”. But then they go away.
We make our homes on these platforms. Set up shop. Scale a business. Connect with our friends. Build a following. Then something changes. A change in corporate strategy. An IPO. A private equity takeover. A merger with AOL. And it’s never the same after that. All that work, all that culture, now painted in a different light. Sometimes locked away entirely.
His solution? Never build on closed platforms again:
I write to you now on a new kind of place on the internet. This place is mine. Or rather, what I create here is mine. This product (a rather fine one by @btrs.coif I say so myself), belongs to @offprint.app. They might go away. Someday they will. But this, my words, my creation. The human act of creating culture. This is mine. It lives in my personal folder. I keep my personal folder at @selfhosted.social. They will go away someday too, and that’s okay. I’ll move my folder somewhere else. You’ll still be able to read this. Offprint is just an app for reading a certain kind of post I publish to the ATmosphere. When Offprint inevitably dies, hopefully a long time from now, this post will still just be a file in my personal folder. And when that day comes, perhaps even before, there will be other ways to read this file from my personal folder. You can even do so right now.
That’s not idealism. That’s how ATproto actually works today.
Purdy mentions above his “personal folder” and in another post Abramov digs deeper into what that means:
This might sound very hypothetical, but it’s not. What I’ve described so far is the premise behind the AT protocol. It works in production at scale. Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, Semble, and Wisp are some of the new open social apps built this way.
It doesn’t feel different to use those apps. But by lifting user data out of the apps, we force the same separation as we’ve had in personal computing: apps don’t trap what you make with them. Someone can always make a new app for old data:
Like before, app developers evolve their file formats. However, they can’t gatekeep who reads and writes files in those formats. Which apps to use is up to you.
Together, everyone’s folders form something like a distributed social filesystem:
This is a fundamentally different relationship between users and services. And it breaks the economic logic that makes platforms turn against their users.
It’s an enshittification killswitch.
Cory Doctorow’s framing of enshittification notes that the demands (often from investors) for companies to extract more and more pushes them to enshittify. Once they have you in their silo, they can begin to turn the screws on you. They know that it’s costly for you to leave. You lose your contacts. Your content. Your community. The switching costs are the leverage.
ATproto breaks that leverage.
Because you control your data, your identity, and your connections, whichever services you’re using have strong incentives to never enshittify. Turn the screws and users just… leave. Click a button, move to a different service, take everything with them. The threat that makes enshittification profitable—”where else are you gonna go?”—has no teeth when the answer is “literally anywhere, and I’m taking my stuff.”
Paul Frazee, Bluesky’s CTO, talks about how this works in a post he recently did on the concept of “Atmospheric Computing.”
Connected clouds solve a lot of problems. You still have the always-on convenience, but you can also store your own data and run your own programs. It’s personal computing, for the cloud.
The main benefit is interoperation.
You signed up to Bluesky. You can just use that account on Leaflet. Both of them are on the Atmosphere.
If Leaflet decides to show Bluesky posts, they just can. If Leaflet decides to create Bluesky posts, they just need to use the right schema. The two apps don’t need to talk to directly to do it. They both just talk to the users’ account hosts.
Cooperative computing is possible.
The most popular algorithm on Bluesky is For You. It’s run by Spacecowboy on *squints* his gaming PC.
He ingests the firehose of public posts and likes and follows. Then the Bluesky app asks his server for a list of post URLs to render. The shared dataset means we can do deeply cooperative computing. An entirely third party service presents itself as first-party to Bluesky.
Because Tangled is Atmospheric, your self-hosted instance would see all of the same users and user activity as the first instance would.
The garden is unwalled.
SelfHosted.social is an account hosting service. The self-hosted users show up like any other user. If I had to guess, most of them started on Bluesky hosts, and then used something like PDS Moover to migrate.
It’s an open network.
In the Atmosphere, it does make sense to run a personal cloud, because your personal cloud can interoperate with other people’s personal clouds. It can also interoperate with BobbyCorp’s Big Bob Cloud, and the corner pie shop’s Pie Cloud, and on it goes.
There’s no silo to lock you in, and thus trying to turn the screws on users should backfire. Instead, services built on ATproto have “resonant” incentives, to keep you happy, to keep you feeling good about using the service, because it enables a plurality of other services as well.
In many ways it’s a rethinking of the entire web itself and how it can and should work. The web was supposed to be interoperable and buildable, but all our data and identity pieces got locked away in silos.
ATproto breaks all that down, and just lets people build. And connect. And share.
Adaptable is where the developer ecosystem comes in. Because the protocol is open and the data formats are extensible, anyone can build whatever they want. We’re already seeing this explosion right now: Bluesky for microblogging, Leaflet for long-form publishing, Tangled for code collaboration, Offprint for newsletters, Roomy for community discussions, Skylight for shortform video, Semble for organizing research, teal.fm for music scrobbling and dozens more. Some of these are mere “copycats” of existing services, but we’re already starting to see some others that are branching out beyond what was even possible before.
The key: these apps don’t just coexist—they can actively benefit from each other’s data. Abramov again:
Since the data from different apps “lives together”, there’s a much lower barrier for open social apps to piggyback on each other’s data. In a way, it starts to feel like a connected multiverse of apps, with data from one app “bleeding into” other apps.
When I signed up for Tangled, I chose to use my existing @danabra.mov handle. That makes sense since identity can be shared between open social apps. What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository. Every app can choose to piggyback on data from other apps.
An everything app tries to do everything the way they tell you to do it. An everything protocol-based ecosystem lets everything get done. How you want. Now how some billionaire wants.
It’s becoming part of the motto of the Atmosphere: we can just do things. Anyone can. For years I’ve written about how much learned helplessness people have regarding social systems—thinking their only option is to beg billionaires or the government to fix things. But there’s a third way: just build. And build together. That’s what ATproto enables.
And it’s doable today. Yes, there are reasonable concerns about the hype machine around AI and vibe coding—but the flip side is that in the last couple of months, I, a non-professional coder, have built myself three separate things using ATproto. Including a Google Reader-style app that mixes RSS and ATproto together. That’s what “adaptable” actually means: tools malleable enough that regular people with little to no experience can shape them to their needs. The vibe coding revolution will enable even more people to just build what they want, and they can use ATproto as a foundational layer of that.
This used to be close to impossible. The big centralized platforms learned to lock everything down—sometimes suing those who sought to build better tools. ATproto doesn’t have that problem. We don’t need permission. We can just do things. Today. And with new AI-powered tools, it’s easier than ever for anyone to do so.
Prosocial is where this all comes together. Not “social” in the Zuckerbergian sense of harvesting your social graph to sell ads, but social in the human sense: enabling connection and coordination between people, without a controlling body in the middle looking to exploit those connections. The identity layer handles the hard problems—authentication, verification, portability—so developers (or, really, anyone—see the adaptable section) can focus on building things that actually help people connect.
Remember why people flocked to social media in the early years? They got genuine value out of it. Connecting with friends and family, new and old. But once the centralized systems had you trapped, those social tools became extraction tools.
The open social architecture of the Atmosphere means that trap can’t close. We can engage in prosocial activities without fear of bait-and-switch—without worrying that the useful feature we love is just bait to drag our data and connections into someone’s locked pen.
The protocol itself is politically neutral infrastructure, like email or the web. The point isn’t any particular app—it’s that we finally have a foundation for building social tools that don’t require users to surrender control of their digital lives.
If you’re building an app that needs user identity, or user-generated content, or any kind of social graph, you don’t have to build all that infrastructure yourself. You don’t have to trap your users’ data in your own database (and worry about the associated risks). You don’t have to make them create yet another account and remember yet another password. You can just plug into ATproto’s identity layer and get all of the resonant computing principles essentially for free.
Your users keep control of their identity. Their data stays under their control, but available to the wider ecosystem. Your app becomes part of that larger ecosystem rather than just another walled garden, meaning you’ve also solved part of the cold start problem. Over 40 million people already have an account that works on whatever it is that you’ve built. And if your app dies—let’s be honest, most apps die—the data and connections your users created don’t die with it.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto talked about technology that leaves people “feeling nourished, grateful, alive” rather than “depleted, manipulated, or just vaguely dirty.” That kind of technology can’t exist when the fundamental architecture treats users as resources to be extracted. But it can exist when users control their own data, when developers can build without permission, when leaving doesn’t mean losing everything.
That’s not a future we need to wait for. That’s ATproto. Today.
So when people ask “how do I actually build resonant computing?” this is a key part of the answer. Stop building on platforms. Stop begging billionaires to be better. Stop waiting for regulators to save you.
The tools are here. The infrastructure exists. We can just do things.
For over three years now, since Elon Musk decided to spend $44 billion turning Twitter into his personal playground, we’ve been watching the open social web slowly, sometimes painfully, come into its own. Bluesky. Mastodon. The broader ATmosphere and fediverse along with a few other experiments (nostr! farcaster!). These aren’t just tech experiments anymore—they’re real alternatives that millions of people use every day.
And yet.
While these open social systems are working, and working well, tons of people are still choosing to stay in closed, proprietary, billionaire-controlled systems, where they have no control, no say in how they work, and no real agency. We’ve heard various excuses. We’ve heard about the pull of inertia. We’ve even heard the complaints that people haven’t found communities they like… or that they actively dislike some of the communities that have formed.
So instead of just writing another post about why that matters (I’ve written plenty), Johannes Ernst from FediForum and I are doing something about it. On March 2nd, we’re hosting an online “un-workshop” focused on one question: how do we actually grow the open social web even more?
And, yes, I’m on the board of Bluesky, but this isn’t Bluesky specific. We want an open discussion and brainstorming on growing the wider open social web.
This isn’t your standard conference where you sit through presentations and nod politely. It’s a participatory event built around the FediForum unconference model, though modified to be more of an ongoing brainstorming workshop (not unlike the Greenhouse events we’ve run here in the past).
Before the event, participants can submit short position papers—your experiences, your ideas, your proposals for what might actually work to engage more people on open social systems. We’ll cluster those into topics and spend the actual event discussing them and brainstorming around them, not just listening to people talk at you.
Here’s the thing: we want people who have real ideas and experience. People who have tried (and maybe failed) to get their friends onto the open social web and learned something useful from it. People who have had success convincing entire communities. People running organizations who are trying to figure out how to make the jump. Builders who want more users. Advocates who have done actual research with actual humans about what’s working and what isn’t.
What we don’t need are more cynical hot takes about why the open social web will never work. If you’ve already decided it’s a lost cause, this isn’t the event for you. Go post about it on Threads or whatever. We also don’t need hot takes about how you’re glad most people don’t use the open social web. That’s great for you open social hipsters, but some of us think it’s important to get more people to recognize the power of open social.
So, for everyone else—the people who believe this matters and want to figure out how to make it happen—we want to hear from you.
The event will run from 8am to noon Pacific (which means Europeans can actually attend without setting an alarm for 3am), and registration is open now. The event will be run online, using Remo, a tool we’ve used in the past for online events, that is conducive to small group discussions and brainstorming.
Position paper submissions are due by February 16th, and while they’re not required, they’re strongly encouraged (you can submit them during the registration process). The whole point is to come prepared to engage, not just spectate.
Look, I’ve been writing about the importance of protocols over platforms for years now. The open social web represents one of the few genuine shots we have at building online spaces that aren’t controlled by a handful of companies (or their billionaire owners) making decisions based on whatever serves their interests that week. But potential doesn’t matter if we can’t translate it into much wider adoption.
So if you’ve got ideas—real ideas, not just complaints—about how to get there, come share them.
As a reminder, I’mon the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn’t really about Bluesky.
The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In “The case for staying on Twitter,” she admits the site is effectively overrun by neo-Nazis, but she argues that people should remain on Elon Musk’s platform to fight for it.
Her argument boils down to this:
Twitter is — without question — the most influential public square we have. At one point, in 2021, a Pew Research poll indicated that Twitter served nearly one in four Americans. By 2024, two years after Musk had bought the platform, 21% of people reported using it.
More anecdotally, no other venue sees elected officials mingling with academics, Fortune 500 CEOs, and celebrities. In Washington, Twitter is still one of the best places for a young think tanker or journalist to gain attention for their work. The posting-to-policy pipeline is alive and well.
But here’s the thing about that “influential public square”: you can’t “win back” a platform that’s owned and controlled by someone who actively opposes everything you stand for. You can’t “win back” something you have no ability to control at all.
Demsas’s central concern is about what she calls a “politics of hygiene”:
What I take issue with is the idea that staying on the platform is somehow failing a purity test. What I take issue with is a politics of hygiene, of cleanliness, a politics where you are judged not by the ultimate impact of your actions but by your ability to demonstrate your total and complete separation from that which you deem evil.
This framing recasts leaving a broken platform as performative “virtue signaling” rather than strategic action. But it’s a false dichotomy. The choice isn’t between purity and pragmatism—it’s about where you can actually have impact.
When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.
This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.
Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to reshape it according to his vision. It was never about “free speech” or the “public square.” It has always been about creating the world in which he holds all the cards, in which everything is designed to give him more power over you. He controls the algorithm. He decides what gets amplified and what gets buried. He can (and does) change the rules whenever—and however—he wants.
In fact, it is useful and important to look at this question not through the lens of persuasion but the lens of power. Your engagement and your work, not unlike your vote, is a form of power, something you can choose to grant to others. Those others, particularly organizations and companies, accrue that power to use as they see fit.
Demsas’s argument represents a broader problem: the learned helplessness that has infected how we think about the internet. We’ve been trained to believe our only options are to beg tech billionaires to be nicer, lobby the government to regulate them better, or hope a “good” billionaire swoops in to save us.
This mindset is exactly what the tech oligarchs want. The more we believe we need them to solve our problems, the more power they accumulate. We’ve forgotten that the whole promise of the internet was to put power in the hands of users, not centralized authorities.
What Actually Building Looks Like
So what does it actually look like to build something better? We’re seeing it happen in real time on platforms like Bluesky, where genuine communities are not just migrating but flourishing.
Take the science community, which has decisively moved to Bluesky. A recent study found that research posts get substantially more engagement than similar posts on X:
Per Shiffman and Wester, an “overwhelming majority” of respondents said that Bluesky has a “vibrant and healthy online science community,” while Twitter no longer does. And many Bluesky users reported getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, on Bluesky. They might have a lower follower count, but those followers are far more engaged: Someone with 50,000 Twitter/X followers, for example, might get five likes on a given post; but on Bluesky, they may only have 5,000 followers, but their posts will get 100 likes.
According to Shiffman, Twitter always used to be in the top three in terms of referral traffic for posts on Southern Fried Science. Then came the “Muskification,” and suddenly Twitter referrals weren’t even cracking the top 10. By contrast, in 2025 thus far, Bluesky has driven “a hundred times as many page views” to Southern Fried Science as Twitter. Ironically, “theblog postthat’s gotten the most page views from Twitter is the one about this paper,” said Shiffman.
But it’s not just about higher engagement—it’s about better engagement. As one marine biologist who studied this migration noted:
“When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.”
The same pattern is happening with NFL communities, which have created thriving spaces on Bluesky that are more engaging and less toxic than what they left behind on X. This isn’t about finding a “safer space”—it’s about building better spaces. Spaces where users have actual control over their experience through features like custom feeds, moderation tools, and algorithmic choice.
What makes this different from past platform migrations is the underlying architecture. Bluesky isn’t just another corporate silo—it’s built on the AT Protocol, which gives users genuine ownership of their identities and relationships. You can take your followers with you. You can choose your own algorithms. You can even run your own infrastructure if you want.
This is building, not begging.
Building Beyond the Screen
The contrast between begging and building extends beyond social media. And, once again, it has to do with building genuine communities.
The same weekend Demsas published her piece, NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani showed what actual building looks like in the political context. His citywide scavenger hunt drew thousands of New Yorkers out into their city:
The scavenger hunt was announced on social media Saturday night. The first clue was posted at 11 a.m. Sunday.
The Mamdani campaign prepared 500 participant cards, and thousands of people showed up to the first location at 2 p.m. Sunday. All of the cards were gone in less than 15 minutes, according to the campaign.
The hunt wasn’t just fun—it was a demonstration of building versus begging. Mamdani didn’t petition the current mayor to make NYC more engaging. He didn’t “work the refs” to get permission for civic participation. He just created it. In a single afternoon, he built the kind of engaged public square that Demsas claims only exists on X—except this one gave participants actual agency instead of subjecting them to an algorithm they can’t control.
As one participant noted:
I think actually trying to have fun in politics and do a little bit of a community building exercise, a way to actually learn about our city — I’ve never known another politician to do it.
Regardless of political parties or even policies, Mamdani was showing how to build communities built not around anger at and complaining, but about possibility and promise.
The theme of the scavenger hunt was telling: it focused on NYC mayors who fought corruption, who built great public works, who expanded opportunity. Leaders who didn’t wait for permission to make their city better—they just built. Thousands of people showed up not because an algorithm promoted it or a billionaire allowed it, but because someone created something worth participating in.
This is the fundamental difference between building and begging. Demsas says “stay and fight” in Musk’s sandbox, hoping your presence might somehow influence him. Mamdani looks at NYC and sees a vast fascinating place, calling people out to “create your own spaces.” Bluesky is giving people the power of choice to create their own communities. One version perpetuates learned helplessness. The other demonstrates actual empowerment and community.
The Power of Building vs. the Powerlessness of Begging
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. While Demsas argues for “staying and fighting” in spaces we have no control over, actual builders—whether creating new social platforms or new forms of civic engagement—are demonstrating that we don’t need to beg for better. We can build it ourselves.
Demsas argues that leaving Twitter is just “deplatforming yourself”:
But leaving Twitter in 2025 is not deplatforming Nazis, it is deplatforming yourself. The Nazis have already taken over the bar. The question is who will come to take it back.
But this assumes there’s something to take back. There isn’t. And before you say “but X still has more users”—that’s precisely the learned helplessness talking. Yes, X might have more accounts. But what good is a larger audience if the algorithm ensures they never see your work?
It also guarantees more organic rather than forced engagement.
Bluesky’s growth isn’t just about people fleeing X’s toxicity—it’s about people discovering they can have actual agency over their online experience. They can choose their own algorithms, create their own moderation rules, build their own communities. They can, quite literally, build the social media experience they want rather than accepting whatever some billionaire decides to serve them.
Stop Begging. Start Building.
The lesson isn’t that we should abandon all existing institutions or retreat from public engagement. It’s that we should be strategic about where we invest our energy, efforts, and attention.
We should build new systems that give users actual agency and choice. We should support candidates who demonstrate what better governance looks like through their actions, not just their words. We should create communities and institutions that embody our values rather than tilting at windmills and pretending to fix ones that actively oppose them.
Most importantly, we should stop accepting the premise that the systems we have now are the best we can do. They’re not. We can build better. We are building better.
The question isn’t whether we should stay and fight in broken systems or build new ones. It’s whether we want to spend our time making Elon Musk richer and more powerful, or whether we want to actually build the future we want to live in.
Demsas worries that leaving X means “deplatforming yourself.” But staying on a platform where you have no control, no voice in governance, and no ability to shape the rules isn’t exercising power—it’s surrendering it.
Real power doesn’t come from begging oligarchs to be nicer. It comes from building alternatives that make their monopolies irrelevant.
The choice isn’t between purity tests and pragmatism. It’s between learned helplessness and taking control. Between begging for scraps from digital landlords and building our own damn table.
The answer should be obvious. But for those still clinging to their spot at the Nazi bar, hoping the bartender will suddenly start serving something other than poison, let me be clearer: You’re not fighting. You’re not resisting. You’re just giving Elon Musk your data, your engagement, and your tacit endorsement while getting nothing in return.
The builders have already left. They’re creating something better. The only question is how long you’ll keep begging for scraps before you join them.
The goal of Bluesky and the ATProtocol, and of the push for protocols over platforms in general, has always been to see more people building their own communities in a modular fashion. One of the most interesting projects demonstrating this potential is Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser, which started as a custom feed within Bluesky but has grown into something much bigger. Today, Rudy joins the podcast for a conversation all about Blacksky and what it teaches us about open social media protocols.
Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site—making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state.
Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers. This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.
We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved,we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses. We know this is disappointing for our users in Mississippi, but we believe this is a necessary measure while the courts review the legal arguments.
Some companies have been blocked by foreign countries, or blocked access in other countries. But geoblocking specific states had generally been limited to adult content sites in the past. This unprecedented response highlights just how unworkable Mississippi’s law really is.
Here at Techdirt, we’ve been warning about the dangerous negative consequences of age verification mandates for years. But even then there are variations in the pure ridiculousness of some of these laws. Some can be dealt with. Some are effectively impossible. Enter Mississippi’s HB 1126.
The bill is ridiculous in many, many ways. It first requires “digital service providers” (defined fairly broadly) to engage in age verification of every new user (the bill is written so badly that it’s not clear if it applies to accounts from before the bill goes into effect). If the user is deemed to be under the age of 18, the site is required to get “parental consent” before making the service available.
The parental consent requirements alone show how divorced from reality this law is. Picture this: your 17-year-old wants to join a social media platform, so now you need to:
A digital service provider shall not permit an account holder who is a known minor to be an account holder unless the known minor has the express consent from a parent or guardian. Acceptable methods of obtaining express consent of a parent or guardian include any of the following:
(a) Providing a form for the minor’s parent or guardian to sign and return to the digital service provider by common carrier, facsimile, or electronic scan;
(b) Providing a toll-free telephone number for the known minor’s parent or guardian to call to consent;
(c) Coordinating a call with a known minor’s parent or guardian over video conferencing technology;
(d) Collecting information related to the government-issued identification of the known minor’s parent or guardian and deleting that information after confirming the identity of the known minor’s parent or guardian;
(e) Allowing the known minor’s parent or guardian to provide consent by responding to an email and taking additional steps to verify the identity of the known minor’s parent or guardian; or
(f) Any other commercially reasonable method of obtaining consent in light of available technology.
So if your teenager wants to use Bluesky (or any other digital service), you might need to mail in a signed form, hop on a video call with the company, or hand over your government ID to verify you’re really their parent—all so they can post about their favorite bands or follow local news. What if the kid is estranged from their parents? What if their parents disagree over whether or not their child can use the site? How do you verify that it’s actually a legal guardian? The law is effectively silent on all that.
There’s a lot more that’s problematic in the law as well. Even if the parent gives permission, a site is still required to block kids from accessing anything deemed harmful… but also shouldn’t stop the kid from searching for harmful information. It basically demands the impossible.
And if a kid does access ambiguously “harmful” information any parent can sue and sites can face penalties of up to $10k per violation and the potential of criminal penalties as well.
NetChoice, the trade group that has been kept busy the last few years suing (and mostly winning) to stop every unconstitutional internet law, sued over this law, and, after some procedural nonsense related to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Moody, got a temporary restraining order blocking the law from going into effect (at least against NetChoice’s members). Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden recognized how obviously unconstitutional the law was, noting that the law was incredibly broad, was not even remotely narrowly tailored to the state’s compelling interest. Basically this law is a mess and the state has no reasonable defense:
In short, NetChoice has carried its burden of demonstrating that there are a number of supervisory technologies available for parents to monitor their children that the State could publicize… Yet, the Act requires all users (both adults and minors) to verify their ages before creating an account to access a broad range of protected speech on a broad range of covered websites. This burdens the First Amendment rights of adults using the websites of Netchoice’s covered members, which makes it seriously overinclusive. But NetChoice has also presented persuasive evidence that “[u]ncertainty about how broadly the Act extends—and how Defendant will interpret the Act—may spur members to engage in over-inclusive moderation that would block valuable content from all users,” and that not all covered websites have the ability to “age-gate,” meaning that “they are unable to separate the content available on adults’ accounts from content available on minors’ accounts.” …. This likewise renders H.B. 1126 overinclusive.
The Act also requires all minors under the age of eighteen, regardless of age and level of maturity, to secure parental consent to engage in protected speech activities on a broad range of covered websites, which represents a one-size-fits-all approach to all children from birth to age 17 years and 364-days old. H.B. 1126 is thus overinclusive as to Netchoice’s covered members to the extent it is intended as an aid to parental authority beyond the resources for monitoring children’s internet activity NetChoice has already identified, because not all children forbidden by the Act to create accounts on their own have parents who will care whether they create such accounts. See Brown, 564 U.S. at 789, 804 (holding the state act purporting to aid parental authority by prohibiting the sale or rental of “violent video games” to minors “vastly overinclusive” because “[n]ot all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games” (emphasis in original)).
This follows on what happens in basically every district court over laws like this. But, of course, Mississippi is in the Fifth Circuit, where good judicial systems go to die. What happened next perfectly encapsulates why the Fifth Circuit has become synonymous with lawless judicial activism. A month later the Fifth Circuit—with no explanation—said the law could go into effect, putting a “stay” on the TRO. No reasoning. No analysis. Just a naked power grab that ignores clear Supreme Court precedent.
NetChoice went to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the Supreme Court refused to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, even as Justice Kavanaugh explained that it was pretty obvious the law was unconstitutional: We had mentioned this very odd result when it happened. Here’s Kavanaugh:
To be clear, NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits—namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members’ First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents. See Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U. S. 707 (2024); Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., 564 U. S. 786 (2011); cf. Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, 606 U. S. ___ (2025). Given those precedents, it is no surprise that the District Court in this case enjoined enforcement of the Mississippi law and that seven other Federal District Courts have likewise enjoined enforcement of similar state laws.
Okay? So why are you letting the law go into effect?
… because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court’s denial of the application for interim relief.
What?!? This is judicial gaslighting at its finest. The Supreme Court has said, repeatedly, that denial of your First Amendment rights is very much a harm. But apparently, they all forgot that.
And now social media users begin to suffer. Welcome to the two-tiered internet. As Bluesky explained, there’s basically no other reasonable way to comply with this law short of blocking all users from the state:
Mississippi’s approach would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recentdecisionleaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurancelaw—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
The harm is immediate and concrete. Mississippi now has a fundamentally different internet than the rest of the country—one where geography determines your access to information and communities. This is exactly the kind of balkanization that the internet was designed to prevent. The Mississippi Free Press, a fantastic independent journalism site covering news in Mississippi, has said that Bluesky has been a huge part of their distribution:
For those of us at the Mississippi Free Press, this is a significant blow. We left Twitter earlier this year for a lot of reasons, and have since made Bluesky our main social media platform (it’s also where we have the most followers).
[….]
We don’t know yet what this will mean for our ability to continue to post on Bluesky. Frankly, I’m more concerned about how this will prevent our readers who follow us on Bluesky from continuing to do so.
Think about what this means: A local news organization in Mississippi can no longer easily reach its readers through a major social media platform because of their state government’s actions. Independent journalism—already struggling—now faces additional barriers created by the very government it’s trying to hold accountable.
MFP’s news editor, Ashton Pittman has made it clear where the blame lies for this: with Mississippi’s legislators who (on a bipartisan basis) passed this terrible law:
To be clear, I'm not blaming BlueSky for this situation.I understand perfectly well WHY BlueSky is blocking access to Mississippi IPs; the state government gave them no other viable choice.We are looking into our options, of course (including VPNs).
And, yes, as with every other age-gating law that shows up anywhere in the world, all it’s really doing is promoting VPN subscriptions. The tech-savvy will route around the censorship. Everyone else—including the most vulnerable populations this law claims to protect—gets cut off.
Separately, I’ve seen some commentary regarding how this somehow goes against Bluesky’s decentralization promises, but nothing can be further from the truth. Understanding why requires grasping how the AT Protocol actually works. Bluesky is one provider on the wider Atmosphere (the rapidly growing set of services using the underlying ATprotocol). Each of those services can make their own decision of how to comply with the law here. Bluesky made this point in its explanation:
This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
This is actually decentralization working as intended. If this were Twitter or Facebook, users would have no alternatives when states make dangerous policy choices. With AT Protocol, other providers could theoretically serve Mississippi users differently (though they’d face the same impossible legal risks). More importantly, users retain their identity and social connections across different providers within the network.
The key thing to remember is that nothing in this law actually makes kids safer. Like all age verification laws, it just creates a ridiculous scenario that infringes on people’s rights, closes off portions of the open internet, and serves no purpose other than enabling legislators to pat themselves on the back and pretend they’ve done something useful.
One hopes that the legislators in Mississippi will reconsider this bad law. Or that the courts (which continue to review this law) issue a new injunction that the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court don’t reject.
Until then, it really sucks that the state of Mississippi has effectively decided that smaller, upstart social media sites have three awful choices: comply with the law and block all access, disobey the law and risk ruinous liability, or comply with the law by collecting a ton of extremely sensitive data and setting up an impossible and unworkable system of “parental consent” that will create a huge mess for both kids and parents. The option Bluesky took seems like the only sensible one in this scenario.
Disclosure: I amon the board of Blueskyand am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly.
It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed “liberal echo chamber” that nobody uses anymore. And yet the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle argues that “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes,” Josh Barro insists “Bluesky Isn’t a Bubble. It’s a Containment Dome,” and multiple outlets have breathlessly reported on Mark Cuban’s complaints about his personal Bluesky experience as if they were definitive proof of platform failure. Not to be left out, Slate published not one, but two separate articles complaining about Bluesky.
For a supposedly dying bubble that no one wants to use, Bluesky sure generates a lot of traffic-driving hot takes. Which suggests that maybe—just maybe—the entire premise is wrong.
The real story isn’t about Bluesky’s supposed failures—it’s about how these critiques fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media and who gets to decide what constitutes healthy discourse.
The “echo chamber” myth
Now, you might think that if everyone is complaining about “echo chambers” and “bubbles,” that there must be solid research showing that social media creates them. You would be wrong. The “echo chamber” critique of social media has been thoroughly debunked by researchers, who have consistently found the opposite to be true: people not on social media live in more sheltered information environments than those who are. Professor Michael Bang Petersen gave an interview about his research on the topic where he noted the following:
One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I’m thinking about the notion of ‘echo chambers.’ So we’ve been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.
I’m a university professor. I’m not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I’m online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I’m a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.
But that’s because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people — what they are saying behind my back. That’s where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we’re not exposed in our everyday lives.
Power, not purity
So the “bubble” critique is empirically wrong. But even if it were right, it misses the more important point: this isn’t really about ideological diversity. It’s about who controls the microphone. When critics argue that people should have stayed on ExTwitter to “engage across difference,” they’re ignoring a fundamental reality: Elon Musk controls the algorithm and actively throttles content he dislikes. The NY Times documented how Musk minimizes the reach of those expressing views he disagrees with.
So when McArdle suggests that “liberals” made some mistake by leaving ExTwitter, she’s essentially arguing that people should willingly subject themselves to algorithmic suppression by someone who has explicitly welcomed extremist content back onto the platform. This isn’t about “engaging across difference”—it’s about accepting a rigged game where one side controls the megaphone.
Community, not performance
The “bubble” framing also fundamentally misunderstands what most people want from social media. When you go to a knitting circle, are you disappointed that most people there want to talk about knitting? When you join a book club, do you complain that everyone seems interested in books? Pundits and politicians may want to broadcast to the largest possible audience, but most people are looking for community, not maximum reach.
Most people aren’t looking for a debating arena. They want to talk with people they like about topics they care about—whether that’s knitting, local politics, or professional interests.
This becomes impossible when the platform owner has hung out a shingle for Nazis, and your attempts to discuss your hobbies get drowned out by fascist propaganda algorithmically pushed into your timeline. That’s not “diverse discourse”—it’s just a bad user experience.
Communities have social norms, which can evolve over time
Any community—online or off—develops social norms. These cultural expectations show up as “we don’t do that here” or “we encourage this behavior” signals. Critics complaining about Bluesky’s norms are often just upset that those norms don’t align with their preferences. It’s a bit like complaining that different neighborhoods have different vibes.
Yes, some users can be overly aggressive in enforcing norms, and some reactions can be trigger-happy (I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of some angry responses). But this is true of every community, online and off. If you’ve ever accidentally worn the wrong team’s jersey to a sports bar, you understand how community norms work. The difference is that Bluesky users have actual tools to address these issues themselves, rather than begging platform owners to fix things for them.
Many of the tensions critics point to aren’t unique to Bluesky—they reflect how people are processing a world where fascism is rising in America and democratic institutions are under attack. When people are dealing with existential threats, online interactions can get heated. That’s not a platform problem; it’s a human problem.
But, also, part of the benefit of a system like Bluesky is that it puts users in much greater control over their own experience, meaning they can actually take charge themselves and craft better communities around them, rather than demanding that “the company” fix things. I’m thinking of things like Blacksky, that Rudy Fraser is building. He took the initiative to build community features (custom feeds, custom labelers, etc.) catered to an audience of Black users who want tools for greater self-governance within the ATprotocol ecosystem.
User agency changes everything
This is the fundamental point that critics miss: Bluesky isn’t just another Twitter clone. It’s a demonstration of what happens when you give users actual control over their social media experience instead of forcing them to rely on the whims of billionaires.
For the past decade, social media users have been like restaurant diners who can only eat at one restaurant, where they can’t see the menu in advance, the chef changes the recipes based on his mood, and the only thing diners can do if they don’t like the menu is yell loudly and hope the chef makes something different. Bluesky is more like a food court where you can choose from multiple vendors, see what each one offers, and even set up your own stand if you want. Some people still yell loudly, but out of the learned habit that that’s the only thing you can do.
Most users don’t actually need to know about this, and they don’t need to buy into the ideology of decentralization and user empowerment, but it’s really all about giving the users more control over their social media experience whether directly on a single platform like Bluesky (with things like custom feeds, custom labelers, self-hosted data servers) or through the rapidly growing set of third-party services and apps, some of which have nothing to do with Bluesky.
This represents a fundamental shift from the past decade of social media, where users had to conform to whatever made billionaires happy (posting to the algorithm, accepting whatever content moderation decisions were made) to a system where users can customize their experience to work for them.
The “Twitter competitor” framing is the Trojan Horse. Bluesky demonstrates just one type of service that can be built on an open social protocol—but the real revolution is in returning agency to users.
That kind of user agency and control is part of what also makes some of the other complaints silly. There are better and better tools for taking control over your own experience on Bluesky, and focusing on finding your community. For example, I recently saw that there are labelers that people use to block out talk of US politics (often used by people not in the US and who don’t want to see it).
We need to unlearn the lessons many people have internalized over the past decade and a half. You shouldn’t be at the whims of any billionaire. You should chart your own course, having it set up to work for you, not the billionaire’s best interests. Critics demanding that people return to X are essentially arguing that users should give up this agency and go back to being at the mercy of Elon Musk’s mood swings and algorithmic manipulation.
That kind of user agency and control makes Elon Musk’s version of “free speech” look like what it really is: a billionaire’s right to control the conversation.
The premise is wrong
Finally, the entire premise is wrong. Anyone who actually spends time using Bluesky knows that it’s vibrant and active with a wide variety of discussion topics (and plenty of disagreements and debates, contrary to the whole “bubble” concept). It’s also well aware of what’s happening elsewhere, as there are plenty of discussions about what viewpoints are happening on the wider internet.
The idea that cultural discussions are somehow missing is ridiculous.
So we have a platform that publishers say drives more engaged traffic than the “mainstream” alternatives, where news influencers are increasingly active, and which generates enough interest that major media outlets regularly write trend pieces about it. This is not what “failure” looks like.
So basically none of the premises behind those “woe is Bluesky” articles make any sense at all.
About the only context they make sense in is as arguments from people who know they should give up on the sewage drain that ExTwitter has become, but refuse to do so. Rather than deal with their own failings, they are blaming those who have made the leap to a better place and a better system.
So, sure, some people have complaints about Bluesky. But people have complaints about any community they’re in. And Bluesky lets people have way more control over those norms and experiences than any other platform and doesn’t support fascist billionaires at the same time. And, as multiple people have already realized, embracing the Bluesky community already works much better than the billionaire-owned platforms do.
