Today, we’re open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets a team of moderators or curators collaboratively review reports, create labels, and inspect content on the atproto network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for users to run their own independent moderation services.
Yeah BlueSky has a lot of control over the network but I wouldn’t say that email isn’t federated because Google controls a lot of the email network.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bluesky released a personal data server implementation openly. But now that they did, it looks like the AT protocol network minimally qualifies as federated.
Somebody has got to explain to me how being a for-profit company with investors doesn’t categorically make it impossible for a company to produce anything other than a product and an open social network that has no bottlenecks or levers of power to monetize to the degree required to return on a huge investment is NOT a product.
It is a prototype for a product that happens to be selling itself to early adopters on a promise it can never keep if it wants to be a successful product.
Bluesky promising to commit to a truly open federated structure is in a poetic sense the exact same thing as Pete Buttigieg promising to support Medicare for all.
In other words, why should I trust you bluesky when I can just pick literally anybody else who I actually have some reason to believe will do anything other than serve the status quo while smiling and saying words I like (which for nerds is nerding out about the AT protocol while entirely ignoring the obvious power dynamics, politics and end goal at play here).
I am not questioning the motivations of the developers of bluesky doing most of the labor, but they will never truly have a say in the direction of bluesky because they are building something for someone else to own whether they realize that is why they have such a good paycheck or not.
I wouldn’t really compare Bluesky to Mastodon. Ultimately, the Bluesky team still has control over what’s allowed on the app and what’s allowed on the network until third parties launch their own AppViews and relays.
Yeah BlueSky has a lot of control over the network but I wouldn’t say that email isn’t federated because Google controls a lot of the email network.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bluesky released a personal data server implementation openly. But now that they did, it looks like the AT protocol network minimally qualifies as federated.
Somebody has got to explain to me how being a for-profit company with investors doesn’t categorically make it impossible for a company to produce anything other than a product and an open social network that has no bottlenecks or levers of power to monetize to the degree required to return on a huge investment is NOT a product.
It is a prototype for a product that happens to be selling itself to early adopters on a promise it can never keep if it wants to be a successful product.
Bluesky promising to commit to a truly open federated structure is in a poetic sense the exact same thing as Pete Buttigieg promising to support Medicare for all.
In other words, why should I trust you bluesky when I can just pick literally anybody else who I actually have some reason to believe will do anything other than serve the status quo while smiling and saying words I like (which for nerds is nerding out about the AT protocol while entirely ignoring the obvious power dynamics, politics and end goal at play here).
I am not questioning the motivations of the developers of bluesky doing most of the labor, but they will never truly have a say in the direction of bluesky because they are building something for someone else to own whether they realize that is why they have such a good paycheck or not.