We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky

This article does seem to have the effect of being an endorsement of Bluesky, though.

(What I mean by endorsement: "Why would this progressive political operator be saying that we need to focus on freedom safeguards for this Bluesky platform, if it wasn't obviously the place for progressives to be. And no mention of anything else, like W3C standard ActivityPub, so that's right out. Clearly we must once again get behind a platform that someone owns. And then work from a position of weakness, like activists. Since that went so well for the co-author's former MoveOn.org, as evidenced by the incoming administration. And we can keep telling people they are under attack, and keep raising donations from them, to continue the fight.")

1) A Twitter clone without the political baggage and chaos of the current Twitter ownership.

2) A vastly overengineered distributed software system with a strong ideological commitment to federated design.

There's no inherent relationship between the two, but a lot of the people who run 1 are heavily committed to 2, and so end up sowing a lot of confusion about it.

I would wager that most Bluesky users don't care about it being decentralized, and in fact want a lot of features (soft block, private blocklists) that the federated design makes impossible.

Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/

"Dual MIT/Apache-2.0 License

Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors

Except as otherwise noted in individual files, this software is licensed under the MIT license (<http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>), or the Apache License, Version 2.0 (<http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>).

Downstream projects and end users may chose either license individually, or both together, at their discretion. The motivation for this dual-licensing is the additional software patent assurance provided by Apache 2.0."

Even when Bluesky decides to fuck around with the licenses, everybody is free to fork the current version crediting Bluesky PBC due to the MIT and Apache 2.0 license allowing this.

And besides that, the community could also decide not to support AT at all but put their full weight behind Nostr (https://nostr.com/)

UPDATE:

And the protocol spec is licensed under Creative Commons:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto-website/

"Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)

Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Bluesky PBC, and Contributors

Documentation text and blog posts in this repository are licensed under a permissive CC-BY license.

For anybody interested in derivative works of documents and specifications, remember that:

- you must give attribution (credit) to the original work - you must indicate any changes made - trademark rights are not granted (for example, to "Bluesky", "AT Protocol", or "atproto", or any logos or icons)

Inline code examples, example data, and regular expressions are under Creative Commons Zero (CC-0, aka Public Domain) and copy/pasted without attribution."

UPDATE: OK, didn't realize it was a configurable setting. I guess I ran into it a few times and assumed it was a default block. Thanks for the clarification.

However powerful the X/Meta AI feed algorithms are at surfacing content people are interested in, it all counts for nothing if people see content that they find repulsive. Its not just far right content, disturbing content in general gets more engagement and is surfaced in feeds.

BlueSky and its AT Protocol, by putting moderation back into the hands of the user, allows people to see the content they want and not what they don't want, making for a much better and more positive user experience.

I predict that this means that at some point, it will take over as the dominant social media platform. There are already multiple startups with VC funding building things on the AT Protocol.

As for the moment, whenever someone complains to me about toxicity in social media on X/Facebook or whatever platform they are using, I recommend BlueSky and advise others to do the same. Word of mouth spread is powerful.

On one hand, it is another alternative if Bluesky falls, but on the other hand I feel like the algorithm makes it a different sort of community.

ActivityPub, Pleroma and Mastodon existed before this, and they just work.

They're in the same general space, but only one is playing the game.

Does that mean bluesky will somehow centrally moderate posts "related to terrorism"?

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

The AT protocol may promise decentralisation and an insurance policy, but that is meaningless if Bluesky the company can stop using the AT protocol and survive it.

As long as the majority of users use the official app and log in to the primary server with their username/password, not the protocol's private key, Bluesky isn't forced to continue using the AT protocol. They still have power to push the enshittify button, block federation, and keep users captive on the official app/website like Musk's X does.

Bluesky and Graber recognize the importance of this effort and have signaled their approval. But the point is, it can’t rely on them.

What’s the point of this article? The repo is dual MIT/Apache [0]. Nothing seems to prevent the author from forking and hacking away. Just do it.

0. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto

It's a pretty inane article that provides no solutions. Twitter got bought and TikTok got made because attention is valuable. There's ads/enshittification because a service like this is expensive to run, also you want to raise money for new features, also greed is a thing.

TFA wrestles with none of this? At least like, consider nationalization or some kind of nationalized e2e platform. Aren't we wishcasting after all?

Unfortunately, this is also strike in favor of the blockchain people (like Farcaster) — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).