decentralization – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the decentralize-all-the-things dept

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.

But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.

I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:

As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:

What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.

At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.

Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.

I’m not betraying any internal secrets in noting that people within Bluesky have referred to some of the big influxes of new users on the platform to “EME: Elon Musk Events.” Whenever he chooses to do something reckless — ban popular users, launch a poorly planned fight with a Brazilian judge, take away the block feature — it seems to drive floods of traffic to Bluesky. But also to other new alternative platforms.

Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”

But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.

But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.

Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.

The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.

We need that for decentralized social media.

But right now, we don’t really know what that trigger is going to be. I can think that some of Bluesky’s features — things like domains as handles, using standardized decentralized IDs, composable and stackable moderation, and algorithmic choice — are part of what will get us there, but I don’t know for sure what the big breakthroughs will be. And neither does anyone else.

As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.

Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.

In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.

The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.

I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.

Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.

I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.

Filed Under: atprotocol, competition, decentralization, decentralized social media, elon musk, social media
Companies: bluesky, farcaster, mastodon, twitter, x

Meta Moves To More Directly Connect To ActivityPub, But Is It Really Open?

from the how-open-is-open dept

Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of “fediverse” platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It’s a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it’s still not entirely clear how “open” Meta is really going to be with Threads.

In the last few months, I’ve been to a few different gatherings that were heavily populated by Meta folks working on Threads where they’ve made it quite clear that they are earnest about embracing the ActivityPub standard, which we noted was an incredibly important step for Meta.

Every Meta product to date has been a closed, proprietary silo. Once you check in, your only way to check out is to leave the platform entirely, meaning you can no longer easily see posts from others on the platform or communicate with them as easily either. Embracing ActivityPub, a standardized decentralized protocol that allows for a more “federated” experience, was a big step towards a more protocolized world.

It was something Meta didn’t have to do, but it’s a move that could impact the wider thinking about how social media platforms operate and who actually controls the data.

Now, some users who rely on ActivityPub (mostly on Mastodon, but many other services as well) have been quite nervous about Meta’s embrace of ActivityPub, as there’s a legitimate fear of it overwhelming the system or causing problems. Or, if Meta wanted to be nefarious, the infamous Microsoft-endorsed strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish, was always lurking.

And while that’s always possible, there are a few reasons to be moderately optimistic. One reason is just that the folks at Meta working on this seem quite aware of that fear and are doing everything they can to minimize the risks and to be good neighbors in the wider fediverse. And while there is still some fear that maybe they only send out the nice, earnest believers to the meetings, while the real bastards are waiting behind the scenes, even if Meta did try to destroy ActivityPub, the nature of it being an open standard limits how much damage it could really do.

Some instances are already blocking Threads, and if Meta becomes too much of a problem, then others would likely do so as well.

And while some had predicted that Meta would never actually embrace Threads, it keeps turning on more functionality, bit by bit. The latest functionality is that users on Threads can now see likes and replies from the wider Fediverse. Before this, users on ActivityPub-based systems like Mastodon could follow Threads users who opted-in to connect to the Fediverse, but the users on Threads would not see any “likes” or replies. And now that’s changing.

This follows what Meta folks have suggested over the last few months of rolling out ActivityPub integration slowly and carefully, to make sure they really don’t overwhelm or break things.

I think all of this is good so far, and it’s good to see a major platform embracing more decentralized social media. But there are still some concerns.

Just a few weeks ago, in a conversation with some researchers about decentralized social media, I pointed out the one thing I’d really like to see, but hadn’t yet, from the Meta side: third-party clients and additional services built on top of Meta. But, to date, I hadn’t seen any.

And, a few days later, I learned one reason why. Over on Bluesky David Thiel pointed out that, last fall, Meta had big-time lawyers at Perkins Coie send cease and desist letters to developers building a Threads API client that would have enabled more third-party apps and services. And, indeed, you can see that threat letter on the unofficial Threads API Github.

There are a few ways to think about this. First, given how much shit that Meta got into (including massive fines) for the whole Cambridge Analytica mess, you can see why they might want to more tightly control any API access. And sending threat letters to unofficial API tools is one way to do that.

Also, one could argue that thanks to the increasing ActivityPub integration, those who want to build can just build something for ActivityPub and get access to any Threads content from users on Threads who turn on ActivityPub integration. So, arguably, the existing ActivityPub ecosystem can act as a third party to Threads.

But, even as Threads expands its ActivityPub integration, that solution is still quite limited.

So while it’s nice to see Threads really doing more to integrate with ActivityPub, it seems like its lack of true openness still suggests an inherently closed and centralized system, rather than a truly decentralized one.

Filed Under: activitypub, api, decentralization, openness, third party apps
Companies: meta, threads

Techdirt Podcast Episode 392: Platform Moderation Or Individual Control?

As decentralized social media experiments continue, we’re getting more and more opportunities to really understand the impact of decentralized systems and how they are received by users. Amy Zhang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, has been studying and thinking about these issues a lot, and this week she joins us on the podcast to discuss a recent paper and, in general, how users are faring in the world of decentralized social media and content moderation.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: amy zhang, content moderation, decentralization, podcast, social media

Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline

from the it's-up-to-us dept

Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That’s some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn’t mean that we need to accept it.

These days, there is certainly a lot of hype and nonsense about artificial intelligence and the ways that it can impact all kinds of industries and businesses. Last week at Google IO, Google made it clear that they’re moving forward with what it calls “AI overviews,” in which Google’s own Gemini AI tech will try to generate answers at the top of search pages.

All week I’ve been hearing people fretting about this, sharing some statement similar to Kevin Roose at the NY Times asking if the open web can survive such a thing.

In the early days, Google’s entire mission was to get you off their site as quickly as possible. In a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine that was later immortalized in a regulatory filing with the SEC (due to concerns of them violating quiet period restrictions), Larry Page famously made clear that their goal was to quickly help you find what you want and send you on your way:

PLAYBOY: With the addition of e-mail, Froogle—your new shopping site—and Google news, plus your search engine, will Google become a portal similar to Yahoo, AOL or MSN? Many Internet companies were founded as portals. It was assumed that the more services you provided, the longer people would stay on your website and the more revenue you could generate from advertising and pay services.

PAGE: We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.

PLAYBOY: Portals attempt to create what they call sticky content to keep a user as long as possible.

PAGE: That’s the problem. Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.

PLAYBOY: Until you launched news, Gmail, Froogle and similar services.

PAGE: These are just other technologies to help you use the web. They’re an alternative, hopefully a good one. But we continue to point users to the best websites and try to do whatever is in their best interest. With news, we’re not buying information and then pointing users to information we own. We collect many news sources, list them and point the user to other websites. Gmail is just a good mail program with lots of storage.

Ah, how times have changed. And, of course, there is an argument that if you’re just looking for an answer to a question, giving you that answer directly can and should be more efficient, rather than pointing you to a list of places that might (or might not) have that answer.

But, not everything that people are searching for is just “an answer.” And not everything that is an answer takes into account the details, nuances, and complexities of whatever topic someone might be searching on.

There’s nothing inherent to the internet that makes the “search to get linked somewhere else” model have to make sense. Historically, that’s how things have been done. But if you could have an automated system simply give you directly what you needed at the right time, that would probably be a better solution for some subset of issues. And, if Google doesn’t do it, someone else will, and that would undermine Google’s market.

But still, it sucks.

Google’s search has increasingly become terrible. And it appears that much of that enshittification is due to (what else?) an effort to squeeze more money out of everyone, rather than providing a better service.

In Casey Newton’s writeup of the new “AI Overviews” feature, he notes that it may be a sign that “the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline.”

Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

I had actually read this article the day it came out, but I didn’t think too much of that paragraph until a couple days later at a dinner full of folks working on decentralization. Someone brought up that quote, though paraphrased it slightly differently, claiming Casey was saying that Google was actively putting the web into managed decline.

Whether or not that’s very different (and maybe it’s not), both should spark people to realize that this is a problem.

And it’s one of the reasons I am still hoping that people will spend more time thinking about solutions that involve decentralization. Not necessarily because of “search” (which tends to be more of a centralized tool by necessity), but because the world of decentralized social media could offer an alternative to the world in which all the information we consume is intermediated by a single centralized player, whether it’s a search engine like Google, or a social media service like Meta.

For the last few years, there have been stories trying to remind people that Facebook is not the internet. But that’s because, for some people, it kinda has been. And the same is true of Google. For some people, their online worlds exist either in social media or in search as the mediating forces in their lives. And, obviously, there are all sorts of reasons why that happens, but it should be seen as a much less fulfilling kind of internet.

The situation discussed here, where Google is trying to give people full answers via AI, rather than sending them elsewhere on the web, may well be “putting the web into managed decline,” but there’s no reason we have to accept that future.

The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants. If you need information, others on the decentralized social network can help you find it or respond to your questions.

It’s a much more social experience, mediated by other people, perhaps on different systems, rather than a single giant company determining what you get to see.

The promise of the internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, was that anyone could build their own world there, connected with others. It was a world that wasn’t supposed to be in any kind of walled garden. But, many people have ended up in just a few of those walled gardens.

It’s no secret why: they do what they do pretty damn well, and certainly better than what was around before. People became reliant on Google search because it was much better. They became reliant on Facebook because it was an easy way to keep up with your family and friends. But in giving those companies so much control, we’ve lost some of that promise of the open web.

And now we can take it back. Whether it’s using ActivityPub/Mastodon, or Bluesky/ATProtocol (or others like nostr or Farcaster), we’re starting to see users building out an alternative vision that isn’t just mediated by single companies with Wall Street demands pushing them to enshittify.

No one’s saying to give up using Google, because it’s necessary for many. But start to think about where you spend your time online, and who is looking to lock you in vs. who is giving you more freedom to have the world that works best for you.

Filed Under: ai, decentralization, managed decline, open web, search
Companies: google

from the directionally-right,-specifically-wrong dept

There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was also a flurry of talk claiming (misleadingly) that Jack had endorsed ExTwitter.

As with many things related to Jack, I think a lot of what happened and what he’s saying has been misinterpreted (by people across a wide variety of ideological viewpoints). A lot of what he said is the same stuff he’s been saying for years and is actually quite sensible.

But, the one area where I do think he’s wrong is in some of his commentary about Bluesky, which surprised me a bit. Because I think he greatly misrepresents what is happening with Bluesky and why I still find it to be the most interesting experiment going on these days in social media.

I do think some of his views of Bluesky are colored by his experience at Twitter over the few years leading up to his stepping down from that company (a few months before the Elon saga began).

I want to go through parts of his interview with Solana, but I think understanding where Jack is coming from is actually really important, because when laid out clearly, it explains it colors his perspective on these things. Basically from the start, Twitter was pretty much the most permissive in allowing all kinds of speech on its platform with an extremely light touch toward moderation, but not no moderation.

As everyone who creates a speech platform learns at some point, you need some form of moderation. Otherwise, your platform gets filled with (1) spam, (2) scams/fraud, (3) illegal material.

However, there is a step up from there towards other moderation issues. Those who stop at the point of moderating just those three things quickly discover two other challenging issues. First, your site gets overrun with jerks, assholes, and trolls who make life miserable for all your other users. As we’ve discussed in the past, so much moderation is really “would y’all just stop being so awful to each other?”

Then, secondly, you have the Nazi bar problem. Many people get confused by this. It’s not just saying that a site is overrun by Nazis. It’s saying that in tacitly blessing the appearance of proverbial (or real!) Nazis, a site is blessing the space as a Nazi hangout, and then it gets that reputation among others, who realize maybe they’d prefer to hang out elsewhere. That leads to new challenges, often limiting growth of both users and business model options.

There’s a ton of nuance and challenges in figuring out how to draw the lines. You can easily see how sites can go too far in one direction or another, creating larger problems. Sites can (and do!) overblock in many cases. And sites can (and do!) underblock in many cases. And much of that is subjective anyway. What appears as overblocking to some may appear as underblocking to others. This is the old impossibility theorem at work.

This also means that if you’re “the decider” in these situations, everyone’s going to be mad at you. This is the nature of running a public platform. This was some of the thinking behind my protocols, not platforms paper. It was a look at whether or not we could, maybe, move away from the world in which we had one single “decider” to get mad at, and allow for a lot more experimentation.

The truth is that Jack had to deal with at least some of that. He was never really “the decider” at Twitter on moderation calls. The company had others who had to make most of the tough calls along the way. But Jack often got blamed for those decisions. And I think that getting blamed for that sort of stuff got to him. He’s made it clear over the years (including in this interview) that he would prefer not to have done much moderation at all. But the realities of the business say you have to for all the reasons listed above. He mostly delegated those calls so that it wasn’t on him to decide. But, he was still the face of the company getting yelled at for all of those decisions, and he really seemed to dislike that (which to some degree is understandable).

That appeared to be a big part of what appealed to Jack about my original paper. He had built a tool that was designed (successfully) to enable all sorts of speech and was celebrated for that fact. But over the last few years, he was increasingly being beat up on all sides, in part because of people (on all sides) were upset with moderation choices. And no, it wasn’t just “censoring conservatives” (a thing that didn’t really happen). Across the political spectrum, you had complaints about what was left up and what was taken down.

Jack, like others, reasonably thought: maybe it’s not great that a single person in a company gets blamed for all these decisions (that seems to have been a bigger concern than the fact that there was someone who could make those decisions in the first place, but it’s easy to merge those two concepts).

Yes, some people will say “suck it up, if you run such a platform, that’s part of your responsibility.” But it’s really important to impress upon you how deeply impossible this is, and how damaging it feels to be in a role where you’re just trying to enable a community to exist, but which requires some level of moderation to keep the community from destroying itself. Yet everyone is blaming you for basically everything.

At the same time, Jack was also dealing with an extremely dysfunctional board at Twitter. He had activist investors threatening to fire him if he didn’t enshittify the platform by squeezing more money out of its users, even as he took steps towards moving Twitter to a protocol. Jack, for all his faults, did seem to want Twitter to actually be a good platform, more than just one that sucked money out of people.

I believe Jack viewed the original plans for Bluesky as something of a lifeline, separating out the protocol layer, and allowing there to be competitive moderation services/interfaces for interacting with content on Twitter. In an early conversation I had with him regarding what Twitter would do in such a world, he suggested they could still beat the competition by focusing on “conversational health.” This would still involve moderation, but just at the Twitter service level, rather than the protocol level.

This is not to say that people should sympathize with Jack. Realistically, the people who actually were making the tough calls at Twitter and trying to balance all of these factors deserve way more sympathy. But Jack was getting yelled at the most over this stuff, and I think that really got to him. He was being blamed for not doing the impossible. To outsiders, the solution always seems “easy.” Stop the bad stuff, promote the good stuff. But, the “easy” solution that outsiders always seem to think will “work” is probably not dealing with the realities and competing pressures of managing a global community like Twitter. Understanding the realities, pressures, and (impossible) trade-offs at least helps understand the perspective, and why it can get exhausting to be constantly blamed from all sides from not magically “solving” things.

That takes us to the interview with Solana, where Jack more or less says all of this in expressing his desire to support decentralized social media protocols, first through Bluesky, and then later through nostr. As I said a few months back, even before Bluesky had launched, Jack had told me that he thought nostr was closer to my vision of decentralized protocols than Bluesky was going to be. And, as such, I was kind of surprised that he remained on the Bluesky board as long as he did. But his explanation here isn’t all that surprising.

He makes it clear that he looked on protocols as a better approach for all the reasons discussed above (and which Jack has spoken about multiple times before, including when he first announced the Bluesky project). He viewed it as a way of separating some of the tough moderation calls from being pointed back at a single CEO.

We were doing something similar to what we did at Square at the time, which was fund a bunch of open source developers to work on the Bitcoin protocol, because it directly benefited everything Square was doing in terms of money movement.

I wanted to do something similar with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn’t control.

So what if we created a team that was independent to us, that built a protocol that Twitter could use, and then build on top of? Then we wouldn’t have the same liabilities, because the protocol would be an open standard, like HTTP or SMTP. Twitter would become the interface, and we could build a valuable business by competing to be the best view on top of this massive corpus of conversation that’s happening in real time.

So it took us about two years to interview people [who would build the protocol]. We actually looked at Nostr — I think the team even talked with fiatjaf [Nostr’s creator] — early on, but for whatever reason decided to pass. I wasn’t really privy to a lot of that conversation, or more likely, I wasn’t paying enough attention.

We eventually landed on Jay [Graber]. She seemed great, and we decided to fund her. Around that time, I was also planning my exit [from Twitter], and Parag [Agarwal] was going to take over. And when Elon made the offer to buy the company, I think she had this general fear of — what do we do? Like, is there any way that the funding could be taken back? We gave them $14 million to work on the protocol.

Again, all of that is accurate, and is completely consistent with everything Jack has said from the day he announced Bluesky. But, also, some of it is just unrealistic. Part of the nature of the Impossibility Theory is that no matter what, even in a decentralized system, it will be impossible to do moderation well, and people are still going to hunt down someone to blame. That is human nature.

Thus, I think part of Jack’s negative reaction to Bluesky was that he saw that the blame and demands were still coming. But that’s inevitable. That’s how this is always going to work, even in a decentralized system. He prefers nostr because he knows that while he’s still supporting nostr people know there’s no clear person to blame, and they know that they can’t yell at him about the moderation failures (and, yes, nostr has a ton of moderation failures, with spam and scams). But, as we’re seeing with nostr, it also creates some very real limitations, especially with regards to user adoption and growth.

Indeed, initially, Bluesky was supposed to be like that, but Twitter was still going to be the main service component above the original Bluesky protocol. Jack would still be getting the blame for running the service.

However, the Elon situation changed things.

The thing about my Protocols paper was that it was designed to convince someone like Jack to go down this kind of path. I believe in the power of protocols, but the challenge was always going to be how to get users to embrace such a system. The easiest path was to have a platform with an existing audience embrace it and bring the users.

The other possibility — building something brand new that was just so good people would flock to it — is just incredibly difficult.

There was a third possibility, though, that I definitely didn’t expect: Elon buying Twitter and repeatedly making a mess of things, driving users away in droves, causing many people to seek alternatives.

In this chaos, Bluesky became a sort of weird hybrid approach. It started out building for that first scenario (Twitter’s gonna bring the audience) and ended up having to do the second (build something new and hope the users come) all because of the third scenario (Elon bringing complete chaos to the ecosystem) suddenly opened up a new opportunity for the second scenario.

In other words, in the past, Bluesky was supposed to be the protocol, with Twitter being one platform using Bluesky’s protocol. But when Elon killed everything, Bluesky also had to step up and replace the Twitter part — the service part — itself, offering a reference app built on the protocol.

Reading Jack’s interview, that’s the part that made him disillusioned with Bluesky. Bluesky’s Jay Graber recognized, smartly, that having Bluesky set up as a public benefit corporation separate from Twitter enabled it to do some important things. This included pivoting to building out a service that could take people fleeing Twitter, while also setting it up to be (hopefully) more sustainable long term. It allowed Bluesky to neatly detach from Twitter right after Elon took over and canceled the contract that Twitter previously had with the Bluesky team.

It also created echoes of things Jack didn’t like. Just the fact that there was a “board” at all made him worried about the dysfunctional board that Twitter had, which caused him all sorts of problems. And as Bluesky launched and was growing, it faced some of those early speedrun issues, as users showed up and demanded specific moderation choices and tools (faster than Bluesky was able to build them).

But it was making those choices at the platform level, while continuing to build the underlying protocol.

That has created some real challenges for the Bluesky team. I believe in their original thinking, they weren’t going to have to deal with the most thorny moderation challenges directly. That would be passed off to the service level: Twitter (and then hopefully others who might embrace the protocol). But, in this world, Bluesky also became that layer.

And the fact that most users don’t separate out the protocol and the service layer meant that now Bluesky was under a lot more pressure as if the protocol and the service were one and the same (in part, because at least for the time being, they kinda are). Also, in building things out, I think Bluesky (probably correctly) realized that passing off moderation to the service layer rather than the protocol layer does not solve for all harms, and there are times when other solutions may need to come into play.

It seems all that just gave Jack flashbacks to all the problems at Twitter:

In Jay’s case, she decided she wanted to set up a completely different entity, a B Corp. That accelerated even more when Elon made the acquisition offer, and it very quickly turned into more of a survival thing, where she felt she needed to build a company, and build a model around it, get VCs into it, get a board, issue stock, and all these things. That was the first time I felt like, whoa, this isn’t going in a direction I’m really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. This was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize.

And then, as you know, Elon backed off [on the acquisition], and that disaster happened [laughs], until he finally bought it, which was the worst timeline ever. But throughout all that, it became more and more evident that Bluesky had a lot of great ideas. And they’re ideas I believe in. I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers.

But what happened is, people started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter. It’s the thing that’s not Twitter, and therefore it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd.

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.

That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create.

So here’s where I think Jack’s understandable concerns about the very existence of a board and the pressures of being a corporation offering a social media service begin to diverge a bit from reality.

Bluesky has continued to build exactly what he has wanted. And it’s almost exactly what Jay promised when she interviewed for the job. I know this because, at Jack and Parag’s request, I sat in on a bunch of the interviews of the various people they were considering to lead Bluesky to provide feedback. And Jay’s pitch matches extraordinarily closely to what Bluesky has become, including the corporate setup.

Indeed, one of the things that struck me about Jay’s original pitch, unlike most others that I remember, was that she included a discussion of how the setup had to be sustainable on its own, and not just as a thing Twitter funded. That turned out to be prescient, but also what has made things work.

Bluesky has built a protocol, ATprotocol, which was built by folks who had experience with the same protocol that inspired Jack’s current favorite, nostr: Secure ScuttleButt. SSB was a really neat decentralized protocol, but it was nearly impossible for the average person to use (trust me, I tried, and I’m even more motivated than your average social media user). Bluesky’s original developer previously worked on SSB. nostr’s creator has admitted that he based many of the ideas on SSB, he just wanted it to work better.

And, while Jack talks up the need for an “algorithm store” where users get to choose their own algorithm, Bluesky has that! Its feeds solution is amazing and there are over 50,000 different feeds you can choose to give you views into the conversation. It’s great, with some upgrades coming soon to make it even more user friendly. Plus, they’ve added in the ability through its composable moderation tools for there to be more customized moderation offerings, which are already creating really unique and user-empowering offerings. So everything that Jack is saying he wanted from Bluesky is there.

It didn’t go in a different direction. It built the fundamentals, as promised.

But the one main difference was that, due to the implosion of Twitter, Bluesky also had to build the service layer. And Jack was really done with taking the blame for moderation decisions at a platform (even if he wasn’t the one actually making those calls). Being blamed for everything sucks. And that was starting to happen with Bluesky, which was not what Jack signed up for.

But it was necessary.

In order to get regular people to use it, Bluesky needs to have a user experience that feels like a centralized provider. One that feels familiar. That doesn’t require them to learn about the underlying infrastructure, or understand what “federated instances” means, or learn how to store a private key securely, or what the fuck a NIP-05 identifier is.

Without Twitter to provide that front end, it made total sense for Bluesky to build that. And, just as Jack had planned for Twitter to still provide an interface on top of Bluesky that promoted “conversational health” while allowing others to surface other aspects of the global conversation, Bluesky chose to do that as well.

Yes, some of that process was messy, especially with some of the demands from users at a very early stage, when the company had limited staff and resources. And, early on, I think the Bluesky team had to come to terms with the fact that it was now taking on that side of things as well, which wasn’t intended. But what has continued to impress me in watching Bluesky as an outsider over the past year and a half, is how true it has stayed to its underlying vision, while also still trying to make its own app-layer usable by people who will never care about the decentralized protocol.

But the interesting thing about where Bluesky has gone over the past year is that, now that it’s building both the protocol and the service layer, the team there is actually thinking deeply about how moderation can work effectively in such a world. How it can use this different structure to actually look for ways to minimize the very real harms that happen in internet communities, but without being as heavy handed and all controlling as a centralized service would be. Jack was trying to offload that because he didn’t like taking the blame for it, but that doesn’t mean the harms aren’t real. And some people do need to think about how to try to minimize them. And to do that in a way that still builds a platform people want to use without having to worry about all the details.

I think this is important. Some (including many people on nostr) argue that users need to understand the power of a decentralized protocol to embrace it, but I disagree. Even if most of the users of a decentralized system don’t know or care about the fact that it’s decentralized, the fact that the underlying protocol is that way and is set up such that others can build and provide services (algorithms, moderation services, interfaces, etc.) means that Bluesky itself has strong, built-in incentives to not enshittify the service.

In some ways, Bluesky is building in the natural antidote to the activist investors that so vexed Jack at Twitter. Bluesky can simply point out that going down the enshittification path of greater and greater user extraction/worsening service just opens up someone else to step in and provide a better competing service on the same protocol. Having it be on the same protocol removes the switching costs that centralized enshittified services rely on to keep users from leaving, allowing them to enshittify. The underlying protocol that Bluesky is built on is a kind of commitment device. The company (and, in large part, its CEO Jay) is going to face tremendous pressures to make Bluesky worse.

But by committing to an open protocol they’re building, it creates a world that makes it much harder to force the company down that path. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be difficult to impossible choices to make. Because there will be. But the protocol is still there.

And that’s why, even as Jack namechecks my paper here, I think he’s wrong in the conclusion of this paragraph, saying that Bluesky went in another direction. It didn’t:

All that said, I really respect Jay. She was under a lot of pressure to survive and do the things that she did. But directionally, I just don’t align with it. And I’d love to see more effort placed on open protocols akin to Nostr, which hits every single attribute that I was searching for when we originally kicked this idea off. If you go back to my thread, and Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms article, it hits every single one of those things, whereas Bluesky ultimately just went another direction.

Bluesky went in the same direction it planned. But it was forced to add on another layer — the service layer that Twitter was supposed to provide — and that was the part that Jack was already sick of.

I like nostr as well. I think it’s cool and has some really cool development happening. Some of the new services that have popped up using nostr are great. But Bluesky has an open protocol, ATprotocol, which actually has many similarities to nostr, but in a manner that hides the technical complexities from users, making it more approachable by the average user.

That’s important! Because the coolest, most elegant protocol in the world is useless without a userbase. And so far, Bluesky is set up in a way that “normie” users can just use it without caring about all of these details. And that has made a difference that even folks endorsing nostr have seen.

Up above, Jack bemoans the “common crowd” that found and enjoys Bluesky, but that’s who you need to build for if you’re not just building a small clubhouse for the technically savvy.

It’s entirely possible that someone will build a nostr client or service that does something similar. I hope that happens, honestly, because I think it would be a good thing. But right now it’s just not there. And if Bluesky followed a similar path, it would just be one of a list of rudderless protocols like nostr, farcaster, and a variety of others that people never remember.

There are some cool things being built on nostr and farcaster (and ActivityPub and Bluesky). I don’t think anyone needs to be particularly tribal about these things. But I think Jack is overcorrecting for his negative experience at Twitter. He thought Bluesky’s role was just to build an open protocol. But the Elon situation necessitated also building a reference app on top of it, which is actually helping to drive the entire ecosystem forward.

There’s a lot more worth commenting on in the interview, but this piece is getting long enough already. I think Jack’s explanation of why he’s embraced nostr (and pushed Bluesky originally) still makes sense, especially given the situation he was in over the last decade or so. Even as many people seem to want to dismiss what he’s saying, he’s right that the approach he’s pushing would be the best for an open internet instead of one controlled by just a few internet giants.

He’s also correct (as he notes later on in the piece) that the traditional advertising business model creates some difficult pressures for companies. He hoped that Elon taking Twitter private would help deal with those, but I think he overlooks how badly Elon miscalculated in creating those new business models.

What he’s missing is that Bluesky is, in fact, building exactly the kind of solution he wants (including one that is exploring other, better, business models). It’s just that they’re building it in a way that the underlying protocol issues aren’t important to the everyday user, but are still there if they ever want to go deep and explore.

That means the incentive structure for a better system is there. The risk of enshittification is diminished. The ability for users to “choose their own algorithm” is there. The ability for others to build their own interfaces, and algorithms, and moderation services, and more is there. It’s all there. Every bit of it.

Yes, it also has a board and venture backing. It also has all sorts of people using it, beyond a crew who revels in the technology infrastructure, which remains a niche audience. Bluesky remains the closest approximation I’ve seen to what I hoped for in my paper. It’s disappointing that Jack doesn’t see it, but I’m glad he kicked it off, and I’m glad that he is still pushing for decentralized social media protocols via nostr.

I’ve seen some people worry that Jack completely disconnecting from Bluesky harms the project, but I don’t think so. It’s true that Jack’s name helped generate a lot of the initial interest (and media coverage). But Jack has been checked out of Bluesky for at least a year (and really a year and a half).

If Bluesky is going to succeed, it needs to shine on its own, separate from Jack. Having some people (falsely) think it was “Jack’s new site” may have generated some initial interest (and some initial backlash!), but Jack publicly cutting the cord means that Bluesky now gets to succeed or fail on its own terms, out of Jack’s shadow. And, for a true decentralized protocol to succeed, that’s probably a good thing.

Filed Under: decentralization, jack dorsey, jay graber, nostr, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media
Companies: bluesky, twitter, x

from the abstracting-layers-leads-to-unique-possibilities dept

These days, everyone hates big tech, and that’s often for very good reasons. You shouldn’t trust giant centralized companies that have collected a ridiculous amount of data on you. There are few reasonable alternatives, so they can keep you stuck in their silos. They just move more and more rapidly along the enshittification curve, extracting more and more value from you for less value given back.

But, at the same time, one reason why people keep using those big tech services is because the underlying services are useful. The ability to connect with people and information around the world is still quite wonderful. However, the fact that so much of the internet has become controlled by a few giant companies remains a problem.

Some feel that this sort of thing is inevitable, and the answer will be to constantly go through a cycle of breaking up the big companies to allow the smaller ones to grow. But, it would also be nice if we got away from the setup where we just expect we’re going to hand our lives and our data over to one giant company, and went back towards the promise of the early internet, where the power and control were at the ends of the network (the users) and not the giant central nodes.

Enter Bluesky, which remains the most interesting experiment in social media. It has recently both opened up federation, but even more interestingly it has abstracted out the moderation layer (along with open sourcing tooling for people to use). This means that anyone can provide moderation services, and users can pick who they want to moderate their experience.

It may be difficult to wrap your head around how this works and why this matters, but I’m going to try to break it down with this article.

Yes, you can say that I’m biased. A little over four years ago, Jack Dorsey announced that he was going to fund a little project called Bluesky to build a decentralized and open social media protocol, based in part on my Protocols, Not Platforms paper.

So you can argue that I am predisposed to liking whatever it is Bluesky does (though, you might also note that Jack Dorsey grew so disillusioned with Bluesky and preferred the approach of a different protocol, nostr, that he deleted his account on Bluesky and spends most of his social media time on nostr*).

However, at a fundamental level, I still think that Bluesky is the most interesting experiment in social media today, even as Meta has just taken a big step towards integrating with the Fediverse, enabling users on Threads to communicate with users on Mastodon (the most widely used Fediverse service).

And it’s because Bluesky can be seen as something of the antidote to big tech, by enabling the freedom to exit, but without losing the benefits of the service you’re using. The main reason that we get these giant tech companies, and the ensuing enshittification, is that there’s no easy way to leave without losing access to the underlying services.

The Mastodon/ActivityPub/Threads (in theory…) approach is different, and hopefully better than just living in a giant silo. You can leave and still connect, but it’s something of a process. You are basically betting on the services provided by whichever instance you’re on. That could be Threads. Or it could be an instance set up by someone else. Or it could be your own instance, which would then involve having to manage it. This has some advantages, especially if you can find a server you trust and feel comfortable with, but you remain at the mercy of whoever is handling moderation for that instance (or, if you do it yourself, you have to keep up with everything going on).

Bluesky’s approach is different because it’s designed to feel like a more centralized provider, but without the lock-in or power structure. Its method of federation is effectively seamless. Personal data servers can now be federated, so that users can control their own data, or allow someone they trust to host it, but where that data is or who you’re relying on isn’t something anyone else needs to know, because it’s not necessary.

Instead, Bluesky is basically abstracting out each layer of a social media service and allowing anyone to provide alternatives at each layer. I think the clearest explanation of all this comes from a thread put together by Daniel Holmgren, who works at Bluesky. He explained the progression from when Bluesky first launched, in which it was a fully centralized system (with plans to decentralize) to where it is now.

As he explains, at the beginning, the whole service was contained on one server, or the “primordial personal data server (PDS)”:

I won’t post the images of each iteration, though it is worth watching the progression. The team focused on building towards a more truly decentralized model and were careful not to “cut corners” that would make that more difficult over time.

So, after the initial server, they abstracted out the algorithmic recommendations into “feeds.” This meant that, unlike basically every other social media app out there, on Bluesky you can create your own algorithmic feeds or choose from the tens of thousands of feeds that others have developed (or you can just take the ones from Bluesky if you don’t want to bother). Either way, you’re not controlled by “the algorithm” that Bluesky controls.

You can use any algorithm, and Bluesky might not even know what algorithms you’re using.

From there, Bluesky abstracted out the “appview,” which separated out the view of the content that people received from the data (the PDS). This would (eventually) enable federating the PDS’s. But before that, they extracted out the “relay” which would effectively act as a crawler of all the (eventually federated) PDS, to feed them into the Appview, to determine what each user would actually see (as controlled by which users they chose to follow and which feeds).

From there, actual federation began. While it was invisible to (most) users, Bluesky actually broke up all users into a set of different PDSs, such that their data was decentralized (but still controlled by Bluesky) without people even knowing it. Unlike, say, Mastodon, Bluesky itself acts as an “entryway” so that there’s no confusion when you sign up. You can just sign up via Bluesky (which opened to the public in February), and not even realize it’s a federated system, because it doesn’t directly matter.

But, then, with federation, it allowed users to move their data away from Bluesky entirely and put it wherever they wanted, while again making the experience seamless for users (setting up your own PDS is not yet seamless, but that’s coming eventually, I imagine).

So, according to Holmgren’s chart, that single “primordial” server was now abstracted out into a variety of different services, each of which is open for others to make use of, while the entire system feels like a single whole.

And, finally, that takes us to the stackable moderation layer, which also abstracts out the moderation. This includes an open source moderation tool, called Ozone (I saw a demo of this a few weeks ago, and it’s cool), and the concept of “labelers.” This means anyone, not just Bluesky, can set up their own moderation service, which users can then choose to have moderate for them.

Or, in Holmgren’s visual representation:

Now, this might all seem a bit technical, but it becomes cooler as you understand it. You can already pick and choose the recommendation side of what you see via custom feeds. That’s which content is recommended to you. For example, I have feeds of posts that are “popular with friends,” one that is of “quiet users” (to highlight those who I follow but who don’t post very often), one that focuses just on “internet policy” and one that tries to figure out what content would be most interesting to me. Some of those feeds are developed by Bluesky itself, some are developed by others. And they all work together.

But, now, by abstracting out the moderation layer and labeling, we no longer have to just rely on Bluesky to determine how to label or moderate things as well. In some ways, it’s like the flipside of custom feeds, which allow things to be recommended to you. With custom moderators, you can also choose which things you don’t want to see (or want to see in different ways — for example, maybe in a special feed you only look at once a week). As Bluesky itself explains:

First and foremost, we want Bluesky to be a great and intuitive experience as soon as you install the app. But if you want to customize your experience, you can easily browse and select from other independent moderation services and subscribe to them in the Bluesky app — as easily as you’d follow another account.

For example, someone could make a moderation service that blocks photos of spiders from Bluesky — let’s call it the Spider Shield. If you get a jump scare from seeing spiders in your otherwise peaceful nature feed, you could install this moderation service and immediately any labeled spider pictures would disappear from your experience.

Moderation services can also accept reports, so if you came across an unlabeled picture of a spider, you could report it to the Spider Shield for review.

So, for example, someone could also set up a “fact-checking” moderation service. Or a moderation service to hide all political content. Or all sports content. Whatever people want. They don’t have to change instances to get it. They can pick and choose which labelers to subscribe to, or where to send reports.

While these labelers can be people or organizations, I imagine with the rise of AI, it’s likely that people will be able to build their own custom AI-powered labelers as well, if they’d like. And then more creative things could happen. Maybe I’m sick of tech news during my days off so I could set up a labeler that labels all tech news and then says “don’t show this to me on weekends, only show it to me on weekdays.”

Or, maybe you need a break from all the nonsense, and you set things so that, on Monday, you only see good news.

And they can all work together (hence, stackable). You can choose what you want to see, not see, what you want labeled, and even more granular levels. Maybe (using Bluesky’s examples) you need to know about spiders, but don’t want to see them. You can still see the posts labeled as “spider” by subscribing to the spider labeling system, but you could automatically set your moderation controls to “hide” those images. Voila, you still get the posts about spiders, without ever having to see the images.

When all of this was being developed, my fear was whether the labeling/moderation systems would find outside developers. But, already seeing how many thousands (as of last month over 40,000) custom feeds had been developed, it really did feel like people were willing to jump in and build. But labelers are a slightly different breed, and a little more complex to wrap your head around (hence some of this post). It’s not a surprise that people may be slower to adopt setting up their own labelers, though I hope that changes.

Already, in just a few weeks, we’re seeing some very early fascinating uses of the labeler / abstracted moderation layer. Someone created a labeler for screenshots from other social media platforms. Tom Eastman once complained that the internet had become “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four” and people who don’t want to see that (or want it otherwise treated differently) can subscribe to this labeler, and set their own rules accordingly.

Or there’s a labeler designed to label “spoilers” content. You could subscribe to the labeler and set it to hide such spoilers from appearing in your feed if you don’t want to have pop culture content spoiled for you.

I’ve also seen labelers that will label content that includes images that don’t properly use “alt text,” which could be useful for those who use screen readers not to bother with.

And, even more practically, I’ve already seen a few labelers set up for other languages, like Chinese. Or a community moderation network that wants to go further in labeling trolling, antisemitism, transphobia, COVID denialism, engagement hacking, intolerance for sex work and more.

I’m reminded, somewhat, of one of the features on Mastodon/ActivityPub that is often (unfortunately) mocked by outsiders: the ability to add “content warnings” to some posts, in order to enable them to be posted minimized, in a manner that can be expanded by users. I find this to be a cool feature for certain things (including “spoilers”).

On Mastodon, however, users themselves must choose that option and adopt the content warning. This leads to fighting over norms on Mastodon that sometimes becomes contentious. Some users don’t add content warnings, while other users wish they would. On Mastodon, the only real solution is to either scold people into using content warnings or somehow punish them (such as by blocking or defederating) for not doing so. This makes the environment unfortunately hostile and uncomfortable in some cases.

But, with a setup like Bluesky’s abstracted Ozone moderation system, people could set up a content warning labeler. The labeler could use people, AI, or a combination of both to add content warnings to certain types of posts. Users who wish for those content warnings to be there can subscribe to that labeler, without requiring the people posting to do anything directly themselves.

In such a scenario, everyone is better off. Those who just want to post without thinking about content warnings can do so. Those who want content warnings on certain types of content can get them. And there doesn’t need to be any public shaming or blocking or anger about the norms.

Of course, none of this is perfect. Nor does it guarantee that all of this will work. There are certainly ways that such systems can fail. Or that they can be abused.

But, abstracting out all these layers opens up a real opportunity to have a better overall social media experience. It creates a system that feels as simple and comprehensive as a centralized system, but which is actually decentralized, and enables anyone else to jump in and provide additional services and features at each layer.

It’s one that has the benefits of a centralized system, without the serious risks of enshittification (if Bluesky goes to shit, you can just move your PDS elsewhere and adopt other feeds/moderation tools). This creates incentives for Bluesky itself not to turn to shit. But, at the same time, it opens things up for lots of others to come in and make the overall system better, but without the cruft and complexity of a system where you have to worry about which server to join, or where you stored your private key or whatever.

It just works.

But it opens up all sorts of clever possibilities that go way beyond just “building another Twitter clone,” which is what everyone else seems to be doing.

And that’s why Bluesky remains the most interesting experiment in social media.

* The last time I spoke to Jack, well over a year ago, he told me that nostr was closer to the vision of my paper than Bluesky. Having spent a fair bit of time on both, I don’t think that’s true, though I do think nostr is pretty cool as well, and could create something cool, if it wasn’t completely overrun by people who only want to talk about Bitcoin.

Filed Under: content moderation, decentralization, federation, labelers, layers, social media
Companies: bluesky

Techdirt Podcast Episode 384: Cognitive Liberty Is The End Goal Of Decentralization

from the tables-turned dept

Last year in September, we released a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on the DWeb Decoded podcast with Danny O’Brien. If you listened to that episode, you know that Mike and Danny go way back, and Danny played an important role in the founding of Techdirt. This week, we’ve got the inverse counterpart to that episode, with Danny joining Mike here on the Techdirt podcast for a discussion about decentralization and “cognitive liberty” (and a bunch of other topics).

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: cognitive liberty, danny o'brien, decentralization, podcast

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.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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

Bluesky Begins To Make Its Decentralized Vision Real

from the nothing-but-blue-skies dept

For semi-obvious reasons, I’ve been following developments at Bluesky closely, given that my Protocols, not Platforms paper was originally part of the reason Jack Dorsey decided to create Bluesky. I have no official association with the organization, though I did help Twitter review some of the early Bluesky proposals and spoke with a few of the candidates they looked at to lead the company (including Jay Graber, whom Jack eventually tabbed to run it).

While Dorsey has since soured on the approach that Bluesky is taking, preferring the nostr protocol’s approach (and deleting his Bluesky account entirely), I continue to believe that Bluesky is the most interesting and most promising of the various attempts at building a better social media system out there. I explained many of the reasons why a few weeks ago when Bluesky finally dropped its “private beta/invite-only” setup and opened to the public.

And yet, as many people pointed out to me, Bluesky still wasn’t really decentralized in any real way. It remained entirely centralized, as the company worked to build up both the new protocol for it, ATProtocol, and the Bluesky reference app on top of the protocol.

However, last week, Bluesky took that next step and opened up the ability to federate.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?

Your data, such as your posts, likes, and follows, needs to be stored somewhere. With traditional social media, your data is stored by the social media company whose services you’ve signed up for. If you ever want to stop using that company’s services, you can do that—but you would have to leave that social network and lose your existing connections.

It doesn’t have to be this way! An alternative model is how the internet itself works. Anyone can put up a website on the internet. You can choose from one of many companies to host your site (or even host it yourself), and you can always change your mind about this later. If you move to another hosting provider, your visitors won’t even notice. No matter where your site’s data is managed and stored, your visitors can find your site simply by typing the name of the website or by clicking a link.

We think social media should work the same way. When you register on Bluesky, by default we’ll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you’d like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You’ll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers’ perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

It’s currently limited to smaller situations, of people who basically want to self-host their own Personal Data Servers. While things get settled, there are rate limits and guardrails for these PDS’s (so, things like only 10 user accounts for the time being). If you want to understand this even more (even if you’re not technical), Bluesky’s more “technical” explanation is still highly readable.

I know that some people hear “federation” and immediately think of Mastodon. However, Bluesky’s entire setup is very different and designed to be much more user friendly in multiple ways (once again, this is one of the reasons that Bluesky chose to create the ATProtocol, rather than going with ActivityPub).

ActivityPub federation has both pros and cons. When you sign up for an instance, you’re basically wholly reliant on whoever runs that instance. Rather than being part of a big centralized network, like Facebook, you’re part of a small centralized server that interconnects with lots of others. But whoever runs your server has pretty much ultimate control. That can work out great if they’re committed to it. But it can also unleash some problems.

Mastodon and related ActivityPub systems have put a lot of effort into minimizing some of the downsides of this. For example, threats of “defederation” are a fascinating incentivizing structure to keep ActivityPub instance admins from going totally rogue, while still allowing for there to be experimentation and differences among servers.

But in the end, you’ve still gone from a big centralized system to a little one, where someone else is in control.

With the Bluesky approach, there are many more layers involved, and federation is less about putting your entire social experience in the hands of one instance admin. Rather, it’s just about where your data/account information gets stored. As Bluesky explains:

A summary of some ways Bluesky differs from Mastodon:

A focus on the global conversation: On Mastodon, your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join. An instance can send and receive posts from other instances, but it doesn’t try to offer a global view of the network. Your Mastodon server is part of your username, and becomes part of your identity. On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds). You can use your own domain name as your username, and continue participating from anywhere your account is hosted.

Composable moderation: Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system. Server operators can set rules for what content they will host, but tools like blocklists and moderation services are what help communities self-organize around moderation preferences. We’ve already integrated block and mute lists, and the tooling for independent moderation services is coming soon.

Composable feeds: We designed your timeline on Bluesky so that it’s not tied to your server. Anyone can build a feed, and there are currently over 40,000 algorithmic feeds to choose from. Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow, and does not pull together posts from the whole network like Bluesky’s custom feeds.

Account portability: We designed federated hosting on Bluesky so that you can move servers easily. Moving hosting services should be like changing your cell phone provider — you should be able to keep your identity and data. Changing servers on Bluesky doesn’t disrupt your username, friends, or posts.

This is important, though there are still some details to be worked out, especially around the third-party moderation efforts. But, on the whole, having the ability to still interact with the wider Bluesky community while keeping your personal data server somewhere else that you control is a big step forward in realizing how a more decentralized social media could (and I’d argue, should) work. It brings us back towards the world of an open web, and away from locked-in silos.

Now, again, there are still some parts of the system that people are worried about, in particular how they could be open to centralized capture. The thing is, there is always going to be some risk of this on basically any system. To make things work properly, you tend to need certain parts of the stack to either work together seamlessly, or it just ends up that a very small number of giant players end up dominating the otherwise “open” system anyway.

This is a concern worth watching. However, it’s also been one that the Bluesky team has repeatedly and readily acknowledged, along with their ideas and thinking on how to guarantee that future Bluesky (or anyone else) is effectively incentivized against enshittification. That’s not to say it will all work out, but so far I’ve seen no reason not to believe that the team has been building with this in mind. Its last few major announcements have all shown continued movement in this direction.

At the end of this tunnel, there is a very powerful vision, one that is partially (though not entirely) laid out in the Protocols, Not Platforms paper. In this vision, people can either self-host their own data servers or find a trusted third party to do so, with the ability to move if the current host turns out to be a problem. It’s one where there are many different tools to allow people to craft their own experience (though composable moderation and algorithmic choice within the system) and the moderation layer is separate and extracted from the data server, the app, and the hosting company.

There will be services that combine them all (like Bluesky today), but also we’re increasingly moving towards the world in which people will be able to adjust things to their own liking. And that can be powerful in its own way. No, most users won’t want to get down into the weeds and tweak things themselves. But that’s where there’s an opportunity for organizations to step up and provide a comprehensive solution themselves, whether it’s Bluesky itself, or others.

But, just the fact that users can modify basically everything, and that third parties have free ability to build apps and services (and custom feeds) on top of this core, has an added advantage, even for those who don’t want to tweak the details and fiddle the knobs themselves. The very fact that it’s possible (or that it’s possible to jump to other providers) creates a strong anti-enshittification incentive structure.

One of the big reasons that enshittification occurs is because users are locked-in. There’s no easy way to leave, without a massive hassle. And part of that hassle is losing access to friends and family. The exciting part of Bluesky with federation is that there is no lock-in, which means there’s much less temptation for enshittification and rent extraction from users with nowhere else to go.

This move towards federation is a small move towards that larger vision, but it’s an important one.

Filed Under: decentralization, federation, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media
Companies: bluesky

Techdirt Podcast Episode 377: Protocols, Not Platforms

from the panel-discussions dept

We’ve got a nice fresh live recording for you today! Just yesterday, Mike was at the Knight Foundation’s INFORMED Conference to participate in a panel discussion with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, moderated by former Twitter Trust & Safety head Yoel Roth. The subject was decentralized and federated social media, especially its implications for content moderation, and you can listen to the whole panel here on this week’s episode.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: content moderation, decentralization, jay graber, platforms, podcast, protocols, social media, trust & safety, yoel roth
Companies: bluesky