Technology

At this stage we can't really know what the future of it will be. My take away is that the early indicators for bluesky are not promising (ie; venture funded, leadership with bad track record, invite only, launched with the decentralization not actually implemented yet) while the AP alternatives of mastodon, plemora, calckey etc are already a living example of a decentralized network.

Bluesky so far to me sounds more like a strategic concession to give up the minimum amount of control to users in order to maintain the overall pyramid of social media. Facebook won the competition but people have started to question the privacy implications. If bluesky is successful in convincing the masses that it resolves the privacy question then the competition is reset to which tech giant can dominate that second layer, which of course is currently operating in a manner as to give themselves the first mover advantage.

I am far more optimistic that AP will continue to grow and improve than I am that some kind of benevolent floss implementation will succeed on that second layer of bluesky (if one ever gets the chance to compete at all).

This is answered in the blogpost:

And once you’re the biggest game in town, people will optimize for you (just look at SEO and Google Search). It won’t matter much that people using the network can freely choose a different algorithm, just as it doesn’t matter much on the Web that people can choose a different search engine. And the more I read about BS’s protocol, the more I think this is done on purpose.

Why? Because it allows BS to pay lip service to decentralization, without actually giving away the power in the system. After all, BlueSky-the-company will definitely be the first to start indexing BS-the-social-network posts, and you can bet Jack has enough money to throw at this to get the needed compute. I guess decentralization is a big thing lately and there are investors to scam if you can farm enough users and build enough hype fast enough!

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Of course, fedi could also have some search and discovery algorithms built on top. Operators of such algorithms (there had been a few attempts already) would also benefit from being first and going big. But their potential power is balanced by the power fedi instance admins and moderators have (blocking and defederating) and by the fact that fedi is perfectly usable without such algorithms. And by strong hostility of a lot of people using fedi towards non-consensual indexing.

You might be interested in reading it, might answer other questions you perhaps have.