bluesky – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Techdirt Podcast Episode 382: Checking In On Bluesky With Jay Graber

from the protocols-not-platforms dept

Anyone who follows Techdirt knows we’re very interested in the progress of Bluesky, the decentralized social network that embraces our concept of protocols over platforms. Bluesky recently ended its invite-only beta and opened its doors to the public, so it seems like a great time for a check-in, and who better to check in with than Bluesky CEO Jay Graber? Jay joins us on this week’s episode for a discussion about Bluesky’s progress and what the future holds.

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Filed Under: bluesky, decentralization, jay graber, platforms, podcast, social media
Companies: bluesky

Bluesky Opens Up

from the the-skies-are-blue dept

Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon.

As many of you know, I’ve been pretty excited about where Bluesky is going as a social media offering, not just because of the people who have been using it (who have mostly been great, making it a fun place to hang out these days), but because of the concepts behind it.

Bluesky was originally seeded by Jack Dorsey in response to his reading my Protocols, Not Platforms paper. The project moved along (somewhat slowly) for a few years. While Dorsey funded it, and the idea was that Twitter would eventually adopt the protocol, it was created as a wholly independent company, which initially had a contract with Twitter. The whole concept was finally picking up steam, just as Elon bought Twitter and cancelled the company’s relationship with Bluesky.

From there, the company quickly pivoted to release a reference app of its own, to give people a sense of how you could build a social media network that wasn’t awful and wasn’t confusing. But, because of the rush to set up their own network, and the numerous features it didn’t yet have ready (e.g., in the early days there was no “block” feature at all), it was setup as a closed beta, where you needed an invite to use the system.

Even with that invite system, Bluesky grew to over 3.2 million users (not all of whom have stuck around, but the network keeps growing). Over the past year, Bluesky has built out a number of new features, both ones to reach parity with what’s expected of most social networks, as well as some unique (and important) ones.

For example, the company has added some (still early) features that give users much more control over their experience: composable moderation and algorithmic choice. Composable moderation lets users set some of their own preferences for what they want to encounter on social media, rather than leaving it entirely up to a central provider. Some people are more willing to see sexual content, for example.

But, the algorithmic choice is perhaps even more powerful. Currently, people talk a lot about “the algorithm” and now most social networks give you one single algorithm of what they think you’ll want to see. There is often a debate among people about “what’s better: a chronological feed or the algorithmically generated feed” from the company. But that’s always been thinking too small.

With Bluesky’s algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use. In my Bluesky, for example, I have a few different algorithms that I can choose to recommend interesting stuff to me. One of them, developed by an outside developer (i.e., not Bluesky), Skygaze, is a “For You” feed that… is actually good? Unlike centralized social media, Skygaze’s goal with its feed is not to improve engagement numbers for Bluesky.

I also have feeds showing me “quiet posters” (calling attention to posts from users who don’t post all that often) or posts that are “popular with friends.” I have a few different topic-focused algorithms as well, including one highlighting breaking stories from journalists, and others highlighting posts from folks interested in tech law and policy.

In other words, rather than letting Bluesky curate my experience (or leaving it up to the whims of a chronological feed), I get to curate the experience myself, with help for anyone else who is creating and releasing their own feed algorithms.

And all of that is about to get even better. Because Bluesky also announced that they’re opening up their moderation system as well, to enable a similar sort of feature for moderation:

In the coming weeks, we’re excited to release the labeling services which will allow users to stack more options on top of their existing moderation preferences. This will allow other organizations and people to run their own moderation services that can account for industry-specific knowledge or specific cultural norms, among other preferences.

One potential use case for labeling is fact-checking. For example, a fact-checking organization can run a labeling service and mark posts as “partially false,” “misleading,” or other categories. Then, users who trust this organization can subscribe to their labels. As the user scrolls through posts in the app, any labels that the fact-checking organization publishes will be visible on the post itself. This helps in the effective distribution of the fact-check and keeps users better informed.

I expect that we’ll begin to see a lot of innovation there as well.

In addition, the company has said that it is finally rolling out its long awaited federation features. While Bluesky and its underlying ATProtocol was always designed to be a federated network, to date, the only real way to use Bluesky was to rely on Bluesky’s servers. There are some amazing third party clients (Deck.blue is an astoundingly great Tweetdeck-like multi-column client), but they’re still just showing you what’s on Bluesky’s servers.

But that’s changing:

This month, we’ll be rolling out an experimental early version of “federation,” or the feature that makes the network so open and customizable. On Bluesky, you’ll have the freedom to choose (and the right to leave) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships can go with you.

I know that a lot of people hear “federation” and worry that it will be confusing and complex, as it often feels on something like Mastodon (though, Mastodon has put a lot of effort into making that experience better). But Bluesky is building from the ground up with a plan to make the federation aspect as seamless as possible.

All of this is pretty exciting. Yesterday, I spoke to Will Oremus at the Washington Post as he was working on an article about Bluesky opening up, and I said something to him (which didn’t make his article) but I think is important. I mentioned that I’ve always believed that there were two ways to make a “protocols” approach to social media work: (1) convince a big company to move away from a centralized system or (2) have someone use a protocol based system to build something that was just, fundamentally, at its core better.

Both approaches have challenges to succeed. But I think it’s fascinating that Bluesky started as (1), but has very much moved to (2) (and, of course, it’s notable that I never included “have a narcissist billionaire ruin one major platform that people kinda liked” as a third option for how this might work).

It’s still a long way to go to see if Bluesky succeeds, and there are oh so many ways it could go wrong. But the inclusion of composable moderation and algorithmic feeds already gives me a way better experience than any other social media platform, and it does so not in the service of any billionaire, but rather in service of me, the user. And that is incredibly encouraging as a start.

And, given the open nature of ATProtocol, it also means that if Bluesky fucks it up, and doesn’t actually continue to build in this direction, others have the ability to make it better for them (and for everyone).

To celebrate opening up, Bluesky teamed up with artist Davis BIckford to create a lovely comic explaining why Bluesky is different, and why it matters. You can see the whole thing in Bluesky’s post on opening up, but here’s just a snippet.

I know lots of people like to crap on social media. And I’ve heard a bunch of people insist that Bluesky is too late to the party, or that Threads will kill it or some-such. And, hey, that may be true. But right now, it’s a place that offers a fantastic user experience, which puts you in control more than any other. And, once federation opens up you don’t even have to worry about it being in service to a single company or a single billionaire.

Filed Under: algorithmic choice, atprotocol, bluesky, composable moderation, federation, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media, user empowerment
Companies: bluesky

from the make-the-right-choice dept

So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity. Twitter has been taken over by the equivalent of a stoned ChatGPT (very confident, but very wrong) and seems to be rapidly driving the company off a cliff. Turns out maybe we didn’t need antitrust reform: we just needed two obscenely rich tech CEOs to be totally out of touch with humanity.

Of course, into the void, competitors are appearing. There were a few small ones that were already around that have sought to jump into the limelight, including things like Hive and Tribel. And then there have been some other upstarts that are rushing to try to be the “new Twitter” like Post, T2 and Spoutable.

But, really, after all this, I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly get all that excited about joining yet another centralized social media site. Perhaps I’m biased (note: I am biased) because it was my frustration with the problems of these big, centralized social media services that made me write my Protocols, Not Platforms paper a few years ago. But, after all of that, the big question that kept coming up about it was “sure, but how would you get anyone to actually use it.”

For years I had argued that the best bet was for one of the big companies to embrace this model and move away from a centralized model to a decentralized protocol setup. Because, it’s one thing to build a decentralized social media protocol (lots of people have tried). But it’s another thing altogether to get people to use it (lots of people have failed). So, it was exciting when Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter was looking to do exactly that. The Bluesky project has continued to move forward, despite all this mess, though it seems like quite the longshot that Twitter will ever adopt it. I’m still excited about the possibilities for it though.

But, really, what’s been fascinating over the past two months has been the rapid resurgence of the fediverse/ActivityPub, with most people focused on Mastodon, one useful and more widely adopted open source software to create a federated social network.

For years, whenever people talked to me about the protocols, not platforms approach to things, and asked about ActivityPub, I frequently downplayed it and brushed it off as less serious. My vision wasn’t about federation (where you basically have a large number of “mini” centralized players who can all talk to each other), but something that was truly decentralized, where you controlled your own data, and could choose who can connect to it.

However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.

And then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was likely bigger players would enter the market as well. I’ve started wondering about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment.” Some people may not remember, but Google entering the webmail space on on April 1, 2004 completely upended the concept of email. It was so different and so much more useful, that many people legitimately thought it was a classic April Fool’s joke. Prior to that, you either had clunky email from your ISP or you used a slow and complicated webmail provider that would charge you if you used more than 10Mb of storage. And then Gmail showed up with a clean interface, that focused on tags (rather than folders) and drag and drop and (*gasp*) 1 gig of storage. And the entire email space changed overnight.

It seems likely to me that something similar likely could happen with Mastodon. Maybe even Google could do it with their own instance. Or possibly someone brand new. Or maybe someone old. Yesterday, Mozilla announced plans to offer a publicly accessible instance. And that seems like a milestone moment. Automattic (who hosts Techdirt), the owners of Tumblr, have said that Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub as well.

Both of those seem like big moves. Not that Mastodon needs giant players to validate it. It’s doing just fine on its own. But one of the big complaints some people have is that they don’t know which instance to sign up with, and the whole sign up process seems confusing. Most people who get past that initial concern and just choose an instance and start playing around figure it all out, but even that mental cost of having to pick in instance likely scares off a bunch of people it shouldn’t. Having a few “mainstream” instances that new users can be directed to seems like it will be really useful.

Also, having some bigger companies developing for ActivityPub can also be useful. Just in the last couple months there has been a fairly astounding set of new Mastodon tools and apps popping up, but, again, having a big “Gmail moment” where things start to expand to another level can only help.

Mastodon obviously isn’t perfect, and it has some very real issues. Content moderation questions don’t go away, obviously, They just become somewhat different (and somewhat the same). But I’ve been surprised at how quickly the fediverse has already been evolving. I’ve certainly run across some trolls and spammers, but often they disappear incredibly quickly. Earlier this week, I even had an instance admin reach out to me to apologize for a troll who had been hassling me, which was a different kind of experience than on any other social media site.

There remain some pretty big questions regarding scaling, but so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how it’s all gone. There are certainly a lot of other questions regarding legal issues for instance operators. I hope that those running instances take those issues seriously, and do basic things like register a DMCA agent. But it’s increasingly seeming like it might even work?

At least on a personal level, Mastodon currently feels like Twitter around the year 2010, when it was… just fun?

Either way, I’m now much more interested in how the federated system could actually fulfill the promise of the protocols, not platforms vision. Whereas before I had feared the many fiefdoms still involved giving up too much control, the ease for individuals or small groups to set up their own instance has me reconsidering that. I can’t find it now, but I saw someone joke something along the lines of the progression Mastodon users go through is something along the lines of 1. Wait, I have to pick an instance? What is that, how do I choose? 2. Oh, I see, this isn’t that complicated. 3. I am so freaking excited to try to run my own instance.

That may be an exaggeration, but many people do quickly realize the cool aspects of federation, which allows for a balance between “I don’t want to have to do everything myself” and “oh, hey, I can do everything myself if I want to.”

That said, I’m still quite interested in other, even more decentralized ideas out there. I’m excited to play with Bluesky when it’s finally available. And over the past few days I’ve been playing around with nostr, a very, very early, and very, very basic (but extraordinarily simple) new distributed social media protocol that is based on clients and relays. Jack Dorsey (who has been pushing Bluesky, obviously) is also super excited about nostr and has said he thinks it’s the realization of my paper. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say it’s been really fun to play around with, if you don’t mind the fact that it is super, super buggy and probably not very clear for the less technical users. If Mastodon feels like Twitter in 2010, nostr feels like Twitter in the summer of 2006.

All that is to say… there’s a lot of fun and interesting development going on none of which relies on a big centralized, VC backed social media company. While those are rushing in to try to fill the void… I’m kinda wondering why would anyone invest in building up a social graph and content on one of those?

We have a chance, collectively, to avoid the mistakes of the last decade and a half. We have an opportunity to not put ourselves (and our data) onto someone else’s farm. I absolutely loathe terms like “surveillance capitalism” or the phrase “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” (because I think both are misleading), but I am perplexed at people who make both of those claims about Facebook and Twitter… and now rush to sign up for some brand new company based on the same sort of model, with the same sorts of risks.

We’re at a fork in the road, and it seems like we should be looking to take the other path. The one that is open, not closed. The one that gives us more freedom, not less. The one that pushes the power out to you, the users, rather than the latest billionaire. The power of the internet was that it was built on protocols, and gave the power to the ends of the network.

For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let’s not run to new ones. Let’s go back to the more open world that we were promised in the early days of the internet, whether it’s ActivityPub or Bluesky or nostr or something totally different. There’s no reason to hand over all the control to just one company that doesn’t provide an escape path.

Filed Under: bluesky, decentralized, mastodon, nostr, platforms, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: facebook, meta, twitter

Twitter Is Just The Beginning Of Jack Dorsey's Speech Revolution

from the decentralization-ftw dept

Jack Dorsey has left Twitter, which he co-founded and ran for more than a decade. Many on the American political right frequently accused Dorsey and other prominent social media CEOs of censoring conservative content. Yet Dorsey doesn’t easily fit within partisan molds. Although Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube, its founder’s approach to free speech and interest in decentralized initiatives such as BlueSky make Dorsey one of the more interesting online speech leaders of recent years. If you want to know what the future of social media might be, keep an eye on Dorsey.

Twitter has much in common with other prominent “Big Tech” social media firms such as Facebook and Google-owned YouTube. Like these firms, Twitter is centralized, with one set of rules and policies. Twitter is nonetheless different from other social media sites in important ways. Although often discussed in the context of “Big Tech” debates, Twitter is much smaller than Facebook and YouTube. Only about a fifth of Americans use Twitter and most are not active on the platform, with 10 percent of users being responsible for 80 percent of tweets. Despite its relatively small size, Twitter is often discussed by lawmakers because of its outsized influence among cultural and political elites.

Republican lawmakers’ focus on Twitter arose out of concerns over its content moderation policies. Over the last few years it has become common for members of Congress to decry the content moderation decisions of “Big Tech” companies. Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube in such conversations, which is a shame given Dorsey’s views on free speech.

Dorsey has been more supportive of free speech than many on the American political right might think. Did Twitter, under Dorsey’s leadership, adhere to a policy of allowing all legal speech? Of course not. Did Twitter sometimes inconsistently apply its policies? Yes.

But no social media site could allow all legal speech. The wide range of awful but lawful speech aside, spam and other intrusive legal speech would ruin the online experience. Any social media site with millions or billions of users will experience false positives and false negatives while implementing a content moderation policy.

Yet Dorsey defended keeping former President Trump’s Twitter account live, and expressed concern about suspending Trump’s Twitter account in the wake of the January 6th coup attempt.

It became clear in the last few years that Dorsey is open to new ideas that may end up being considered mainstream eventually. We are still in the early years of the Internet and social media and users are used to centralized platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But, increasingly, there are decentralized alternatives, and a few years ago Dorsey announced the decentralized social media project BlueSky, with the goal of moving Twitter over to such a system eventually.

Dorsey has not been shy about his passion for decentralization, citing the cryptocurrency bitcoin as a particular influence, “largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.”

I predict that in the coming years decentralized social media will gradually become more popular than current centralized platforms. As I wrote earlier this year:

“Americans across the political spectrum may look to decentralized social media and cryptocurrencies if their political allies continue to criticize household name firms. Those involved in protest movements as varied as Black Lives Matter and #StopTheSteal are especially likely to embrace such alternatives given their experiences with surveillance.

But Americans fed up with what they perceive to be politically?motivated content moderation and Big Tech’s irresponsible approach to harassment and misinformation may also join an exit from popular platforms and use decentralized alternatives. If they do, members of Congress upset over the spread of specific political content, COVID 19 misinformation, and election conspiracy theories will have to reach beyond Big Tech and grapple with decentralized systems where there is no CEO to subpoena or financial institution to investigate.”

Such platforms can embrace a Twitter-like aesthetic. Mastodon, a decentralized and open source social media service, looks very similar to Twitter, allowing users to send “toots.” Gab, a right wing social media network, which also mimics Twitter, became a Mastodon fork in 2019 after adopting Mastodon software. As policy fights over “Big Tech” and online speech continue, we should not be surprised if more people across the political spectrum adopt decentralized social media.

Dorsey clearly believes in a future where decentralized social media replaces centralized online speech platforms. If he is vindicated in that prediction it is likely that Dorsey’s legacy will be more bound to his work in decentralization more than his career at Twitter.

Matthew Feeney is the director of Cato?s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he works on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties.

Filed Under: bluesky, decentralization, free speech, jack dorsey
Companies: twitter

Why Did Not A Single Representative Want To Discuss Jack Dorsey's Plans For Dealing With Disinformation?

from the they-don't-care-about-actual-solutions dept

As I’m sure most people are aware, last week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee held yet another hearing on “big tech” and its content moderation practices. This one was ostensibly on “disinformation,” and had Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as the panelists. It went on for five and a half hours which appears to be the norm for these things. Last week, I did write about both Zuckerberg and Pichai’s released opening remarks, in which both focused on various efforts they had made to combat disinfo. Of course, the big difference between the two was that Zuckerberg then suggested 230 should be reformed, while Pichai said it was worth defending.

If you actually want to watch all five and a half hours of this nonsense, you can do so here:

As per usual — and as was totally expected — you got a lot more of the same. You had very angry looking Representatives practically screaming about awful stuff online. You had Democrats complaining about the platforms failing to take down info they disliked, while just as equally angry Republicans complained about the platforms taking down content they liked (often this was the same, or related, content). Amusingly, often just after saying that websites took down content they shouldn’t have (bias!), the very same Representatives would whine “but how dare you not take down this other content.” It was the usual mess of “why don’t you moderate exactly the way I want you to moderate,” which is always a silly, pointless activity. There was also a lot of “think of the children!” moral panic.

However, Jack Dorsey’s testimony was somewhat different than Zuckerberg’s and Pichai’s. While it also talks somewhat about how Twitter has dealt with disinformation, his testimony actually went significantly further in noting real, fundamental changes that Twitter is exploring that go way beyond the way most people think about this debate. Rather than focusing on the power that Twitter has to decide how, who, and what to moderate, Dorsey’s testimony talked about various ways in which they are seeking to give more control to end users themselves and empower those end users, rather than leaving Twitter as the final arbiter. He talked about “algorithmic choice” so that rather than having Twitter controlling everything, different users could opt-in to different algorithmic options, and different providers could create their own algorithmic options. And he mentioned the Bluesky project, and potentially moving Twitter to a protocol-based system, rather than one that Twitter fully controls.

Twitter is also funding Bluesky, an independent team of open source architects, engineers, and designers, to develop open and decentralized standards for social media. This team has already created an initial review of the ecosystem around protocols for social media to aid this effort. Bluesky will eventually allow Twitter and other companies to contribute to and access open recommendation algorithms that promote healthy conversation and ultimately provide individuals greater choice. These standards will support innovation, making it easier for startups to address issues like abuse and hate speech at a lower cost. Since these standards will be open and transparent, our hope is that they will contribute to greater trust on the part of the individuals who use our service. This effort is emergent, complex, and unprecedented, and therefore it will take time. However, we are excited by its potential and will continue to provide the necessary exploratory resources to push this project forward.

All of these were showing that Dorsey and Twitter are thinking about actual ways to deal with many of the complains that our elected officials insist are the fault of social media — including the fact that no two politicians seem to agree one what is the “proper” level of moderation. By moving to something like protocols and algorithmic choice, you could allow different individuals, groups, organizations and others to set their own standards and rules.

And, yes, I’m somewhat biased here, because I have suggested this approach (as have many others). That doesn’t mean I’m convinced it will absolutely work, but I do think it’s worth experimenting with.

And what I had hoped was that perhaps, if Congress were actually interested in solving the perceived problems they declared throughout the hearing, then they would perhaps explore these initiatives, and ask Jack to explain how they might impact questions around disinformation or harm or “censorship” or “think of the children.” Because there are lots of interesting discussions to be had over whether or not this approach will help deal with many of those issues.

But as far as I can tell not one single elected official ever asked Jack about any of this. Not one. Now, I will admit that I missed some of the hearing to take a few meetings, but I asked around and others I know who watched the entire thing through could not recall it coming up beyond Jack mentioning it a few times during the hearing.

What I did hear a lot of, however, was members of the House insisting, angrily (always angrily), that none of the CEOs presenting were willing to “offer solutions” and that’s why “Congress must and will act!”

All it did was drive home the key idea that this was not a serious hearing in which Congress hoped to learn something. This was yet another grandstanding dog and pony show where Congressional members got to get their clips and headlines they can put on the very same social media platforms they insist are destroying America. But when they demanded to hear “solutions” to the supposed problems they raised, and when one of the CEOs on the panel put forth some ideas on better ways to approach this… every single one of those elected officials ignored it. Entirely. Over five and a half hours, and not one asked him to explain what he meant, or to explore how it might help.

This is not Congress trying to fix the “problems” of social media. This is Congress wanting to grandstand on social media while pretending to do real work.

Filed Under: algorithmic choice, bluesky, congress, content moderation, end users, grandstanding, jack dorsey, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: bluesky, twitter