Well, that didn’t take long… Just gonna leave this here for posterity.
It’s just so funny because a few days ago I wrote a post in the fediverse that predicted exactly this. I swear, Bluesky will be so bloated with investors’ money in the coming years that it will eventually burst and then they’re screwed.
I was thinking of your post when I posted this here, actually. Your timing was amazing!
Honestly, I don’t have any sympathy whatsoever for anybody that chooses to make their home on Bluesky. They’re trading privacy and security for convenience yet again with absolutely NO evidence that Bluesky cares on whit about either of the former. It’s false security. And, there’s a large part of their userbase that, sadly, just isn’t going to give a single shit that they’re being productized, monetized, and commoditized yet again.
I get why people might want to be on that site, and more power to them. What I don’t get is the willful ignorance on the part of their average user as to what’s really going on and who’s actually controlling the site that they’re using.
I mean, as much as we may complain and whine about what Gargron and the Mastodon Foundation is doing, the simple answer is that enough people could leave Mastodon and go to another platform like Akkoma or Misskey and not really lose their network, which would seriously undermine Mastodon’s influence as the, well, elephant in the fedi room. Bluesky and Threads users can’t do that because they’re not truly federated.
If the users aren’t going to take the time to understand that, and do the investigative work to know why they’re joining one of those “federated-but-not-really” networks, then they deserve everything that comes to them.
I was tempted for the first time today. A super relaxing podcast I listen to had a Masto logo on their website. But they hadn’t posted there in months. I look at their Insta, and they are all over Bsky apparently. Same with a lot of my music mates. They tried Masto for like 5 mins but ultimately they wanted Threads or Bsky.
I love the community I’ve found on Fedi and want to share it with others, but they don’t want to spend time finding their people on here. It’s like I’m offering them nerdy cake from my favourite local nerdy baker, and going “try it it’s delicious it’s really cool trust me” and they are all like “uggghh no”.
I just want to hang out, but not over there! Don’t make me go over there with the creepy oligarchs and crypto bros! I don’t know why they’re willing to invest effort in these corpo sites after everything, but I suspect it’s something to do with all that press coverage going “everyone is FLOCKING to Bluesky!!!” If it’s nearly working on me, it must be like feckin crack to people who don’t grimace in pain every time they have to open Instagram.
I joined it this past weekend just to see what the hubbub is. And I think you’re kind of beating around the bush of what I believe is the truth: more people care about a Twitter replacement than they do about a social media alternative, and that’s exactly what Bluesky is designed to be.
It’s familiar and people know how to navigate it. And I daresay that Bluesky has been a bit disingenuous about how “federated” and “decentralized” it really is in practice, but it is definitely a familiar system that could be decentralized with enough resources at one’s disposal (see the Blacksky project, which is essentially a wholly separate AT stack primarily for POC folks).
The harsh reality is that there are still far too many people that just don’t care about the potential to enshittify and will always trade privacy and interaction for convenience and what they already know because it’s where somebody told them “all the interesting people are”. They’d rather filter down the entire “federated” stream themselves rather than starting with a smaller community and working upwards to broaden their social graph. It’s a new paradigm that, unfortunately, a lot of social media users just aren’t ready for and actually don’t care about doing.
They’re still stuck in the old centralized mindset and don’t know how to interact any other way, and Bluesky has given them that.
If the facts that Bluesky is being invested in by cryptobro VC firms and is (at the moment) still centralized enough to be taken over and controlled don’t keep people from signing up, I don’t know what will. The assumption in my mind will always be that Bluesky is coming from the same ethos as Twitter did, just with different underlying technology that will potentially be more resilient. Only time will tell how that bears out. I am just not willing to put any more than a few eggs in that basket until I see some much more encouraging results of them making good on their promises.