So, if you’re online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.
@jcsalterego.bsky.social on Bluesky: "(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??" @jay.bsky.team quotes posts this with: "Too real. We're going to try to fix this. Social media doesn't have to be this way." @antioccident.bsky.social replies to jay asking "have y'all banned Jesse Singal yet or" and Jay responds with "WAFFLES"
[…]
Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.

AT Proto decentralization doesn’t exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won’t be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky’s end.

Bluesky inc isn’t really making ‘a protocol’, they’re making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.

I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don’t run a social media platform.

This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.

  • Skavau@piefed.social
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    19 hours ago

    I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren’t even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.

    I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just… didn’t have anything say. It’s just a “shout into the ether” site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That’s a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.

    • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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      55 minutes ago

      similar story here

      I just wanted any alternative to shitter for public accounts