Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
I get the mentality, but that’s the problem with enshitification. It always starts good, but once all the twitter traffic moves over, and the world becomes dependent on BlueSky the way it still is for Twitter, what do they become next?
It would be better to push people away from the closed platform and towards the actual open platform.
Edit: maybe BlueSky is open source. In such case, if they start fucking around, maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community. I think until other instances gain tractions, it is hard to consider BlueSky comparable to mastadon.
if shareholders start shenanigans.
That happens only when user count and platform lock in are past the point of no return. This sentence is the essence of why platforms have been allowed to do this again and again.
Its already too late for bluesky, because even if they started federating now, any other instance would be in such a minority that it would have zero sway over the wider federation if bluesky HQ went rogue.
That’s exactly what Bluesky was designed for: so that anyone can clone their qubibytes of data and start a new central platform anytime without any account loss (though this mechanism relies on user domain owners staying the same). You can read more at https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ from the ‘Bluesky is centralized, but “credible exit” is a worthy pursuit’ section on.
Is this possible to do now? If BlueSky was bought out by somebody like Trump, could he disable this feature?
BlueSky is not open source, is it? The entire premise of things like mastodon and Lemmy is that they are open source and federated at their core. Nobody can change that.
BlueSky is not federated at its core or there would be other BlueSky instances.
@danc4498 @Aatube I’m not quite sure how it’s set up, but someone is trying it: https://bsky.app/profile/transrights.northsky.social/post/3lkm5ii4mo22w
maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community
The network effect makes this extremely difficult, even with the source code, it’s basically starting from scratch again.
It’s not from scratch; every piece of old data is public. I’ve sent a link somewhere else here.
In theory I guess. But you’d need a ton of funding just to get the server power for that, and there’s no guarantee that users will switch over to your service. And if Bluesky starts turning bad then they could start blocking your instance. Also the users are much more valuable than the data. There’s lots of ways this could fail to pan out. The Fediverse is much more flexible to new instances joining.
There is a recent community project that focuses on federating Bluesky without the Bluesky devs’ involvement:
The devs also made it clear that if ever bsky became crap, the system is made so that you could just jump over to another instance and go from there.
So far so good, but yeah I get it, the more they talk about investors, the more I’m reluctant to jump in fully.
Except they haven’t actually backed that up with a way for you to jump servers. If the central Bsky server goes down, it takes the network with it. Until they actually let other people host, it’s just meaningless posturing. Without a way for people to leave their network you are as captive there as you are on Twitter
