as someone with a very limited understanding internet stuff what are the main issues w bluesky as a twitter replacement?
(disclaimer: this is not the official position of anti software software club nor have I even asked my coworkers to proofread this)
- in its past few months of operational history it's become obvious that bluesky has very little intent on doing anything beyond the bare minimum as far as moderation:
- noted op-ed doofus matt yglesias joined the site and immediately got harassed for being matt yglesias1 and couldn't block the people who were harassing him because blocks weren't a concept that existed on the site at the time; they had to implement blocks on an emergency basis because of the bad press.
- their new community guidelines (which won't apply for another two weeks) are the first revision which attempt to set local speech rules beyond "be polite and respectful".
- even the new community guidelines make clear that these are rules which only apply to Bluesky Social itself and cannot be enforced on other instances of the AT Protocol.
- their "composable moderation" content labels (including the "political - hate groups" label that gave rise to bluesky's famous "racism slider") were originally applied exclusively by AI models, and I suspect this is still the case.
- despite being a supposedly "decentralized" service, none of the actual federation/decentralization story seems to have been publicly thought through at all, and I assume that the interaction of decentralization and speech policy is even less thought through than that.
the two possible futures I see for bluesky are
a) the future where it actually gets effectively decentralized, but all of the development work is being done by people who deeply believe in all of the worst "free speech wing of the free speech party" mistakes that twitter made in the early 2010s and the service is effectively unmoderatable;
b) the future where Bluesky and Bluesky PBLLC remain hegemonic in the space and we just get Trump-Era Twitter 2, except this time their moderation team gets to say "don't like it? run your own service" -- which they will absolutely say an order of magnitude more often to marginalized people than people with political views on the far right.
also, not on a technical level, but I get very bad vibes from trusting a twitter-funded twitter spinout2 with jack dorsey -- the cofounder of block fka square, a financial services company which is still making plays in the cryptocurrency space -- staffed by a lot of people who worked on twitter's cryptocurrency projects. it doesn't matter how many adamant denials they issue that cryptocurrency will be involved, I just do not and will never trust it.
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in case it's not already clear, I support harassing him because of articles like this
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fun fact I discovered recently: jack still owns $1 billion of twitter; he negotiated this in the musk acquisition
if Bluesky/AT Protocol does become a cryptocurrency product, I expect the likeliest course is that they'll do something connected only at arm's length to bitcoin and ethereum in order to wash their hands of the bad PR of the crypto bubble and the ESG concerns around the major cryptocurrencies -- e.g. having a special-purpose token that you have to burn to make posts that are visible outside of your home instance, which they make a market in and use the proceeds to fund Bluesky PBLLC and other AT Protocol developers.
I was the main author of our cryptocurrency position piece last year and want to reiterate my/our opinion that cryptocurrency has negative qualities beyond just the fact that it's a scam or bad for the environment. building computer systems on cryptocurrency enshrines the logic of market exchange into their very core, and none of this changes by switching tokens or getting rid of proof-of-work.
