Gregory's ServerAs opposed to Google's "Don't be evil", a commandment for the everpresent, "the organization is a future adversary" acknowledges the realities of the future, that it is uncertain, and in fact, that power-dynamics-wise, there will be pressure to make things worse.
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62 comments
 @cwebber good work here. i *really* detest the seemingly objective fact that a google can't be p2p, but i can't crack it either. though considering the SEO vulns that google has, i wonder if even google "works"  To this end, Bluesky's goals of "credible exit" are actually very important. It creates a similar pressure for the organization itself to stay true as long as it can, even acknowledging the organization as a future adversary, and actually preparing for it. I am pro-Bluesky-credible-exit. And there *will* be a lot of pressure: Bluesky has taken VC money as investments; the pattern of such is that early on, things are very good and flexible, and after some time, the investors start placing pressure to enshittify. I have seen good peoples' orgs clawed from their hands. It happens. This happens despite the very best people with the very best intentions. Talk to early Twitter co-founders and they will tell you the org that things became was not the org that they envisioned. A future adversary indeed. So we should plan for it today. Before we continue further, I have done about every job imaginable in a FOSS project/organization. Fundraising, by far, is the worst, and the most stressful. It's incredibly hard to raise anything to do anything. I think that's worth acknowledging. The structure of an organization does matter. There's a reason that @spritely is a 501(c)(3) in the US. Any money we take in is a donation: we aren't "delivering on an investment" (though we must deliver on *results*) Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation, also interesting A Public Benefit Corporation has a mission for the public good, but can take investments in the way a nonprofit cannot. This also means it can move much faster. Given the influx of users to Bluesky, taking investments this way may have been the only load handling route available this fast. Again, this is all tuned to "What is Bluesky trying to build?" Bluesky might not be a good "decentralized Twitter replacement", but it is a good "Twitter replacement" with the possibility of "credible exit" That Bluesky is providing needs for many users who are looking for refuge from a white supremacist site *today* is something to pause and acknowledge the difficulty and scope of doing so quickly and in the moment. I'm glad Bluesky is here at this stressful geopolitical moment in history. There will be a lot of pressure soon from investors: run ads, make premium accounts that do not actually make sense in a decentralized way, so on and so on. In this way, "credible exit" is the most important thing for Bluesky the organization and its community to push on *today*  Why give them soooooo much space? Did they pay you for it? I think to counter or criticize @cwebber you've to come forward with something technical as long as you can't prove a big money-flow. @serapath @DavidBruchmann @cwebber regarding human nature: the reason the blog and posts are so polite is cuz 1:this is a public place and 2:she knows someone who works at bluesky will read it. @serapath Interesting that you come at someone that actually knows the people, politics and technologies on both sides. Also, very interesting to put Mastodon and Nostr in the same sentence as vast majority of Nostr stakeholders would tell you that Mastodon is not in fact decentralised What I will *not* accept is the goalposts being moved on decentralization and federation. Bluesky is neither decentralized nor federated. If Bluesky wants to become so, it has an enormous amount of work to do, particularly in terms of architectural design. Blogs are decentralized, Google is not. Bluesky will face every pressure to be enshittified. Bluesky has even, correctly, acknowledged this. It is up to Bluesky and its community to rise to the challenge of "credible exit" knowing that this is a likely, perhaps inevitable, risk. The org is indeed a future adversary. So what now? And here it is. We have reached the final part. I am not even going to take a tea break. I am not even going to go to the bathroom. I kinda have to, but we are powering through. We have reached the conclusion of this megathread, and "summary" of an equally long article. I laid out definitions of "decentralization" and "federation", and Bluesky meets neither, without major rearchitecting or moving the goalposts on those terms, which I cannot accept. However, "credible exit" is a good goal for Bluesky. Bluesky created that term and it's a good and feasible goal. I laid out a strong critique, but let me end on a call to empathy. Bluesky is built by good people, and the fediverse is built by good people. Neither reflect the designs I presently would like to see today, but ultimately these are built by humans trying their absolute hardest. The infrastructure we build reflects our social dynamics, and our social dynamics are made possible by our infrastructure. This thread has been long, and I have said everything I have to say. Thanks for listening. I hope we can build a good future for each other. ๐   @cwebber thanks for taking the time to write his down. It has been really interesting. @cwebber People build infrastructure. For example, my grandfather helped build Rt 128 near Boston, MA as a civil engineer.  @cwebber I am very much looking forward to reading this thread in full with my morning coffee tomorrow. thanks for putting in the time and energy to clear up the misconceptions around these topics. ๐ @cwebber This was a fun read over the course of the day. I would check out with your breaks and come check back in an hour or two later to continue. Great analysis and I think you did a good job to be fair to the Bluesky folks and evenly critical of the many challenges we have here on the fediverse side. Thank you for writing it all up. many details I don't know and would take me long time to understand in detail. The problem with collisions because of shortened hashes I know from another system too, it's indeed a bad idea and leads to problems. @cwebber ๐ป cheers. This was an enjoyable read. Perfectly distracted me while I waited for my wife to finish their appointment. ๐  @cwebber This thread was the best part of my day. Thank you so much, Christine! @cwebber Woohoo, I made it to the end!!! @cwebber Thank you for taking your time to write this amazingly elaborate and informative thread. It helped me understand the Bluesky/Fediverse discussion a little better ๐๐คฉ   @cwebber Thanks for such a very helpful thread. I generally prefer blogs to long threads, but I suspect the long thread was really necessary this time. I can now read the blog if I want to. Please advise: does the blog have anything significant beyond the thread? (I'm particularly interested in content addressable storage and decentralisation, having spent over a year on docker/OCI image relocation. We don't want CAS to be another "Google" design decision.) @cwebber It's taking away from mastodon for no good reason. It's also taking away the opportunity to run more nostr relays and form a twitter like bubble on nostr instead of supporting an unnecessary project like bluesky - which many have written about. We dont need centralization like bluesky is offering. We can do better now If there was no mastodon and no nostr, then maybe yes, but it's not 2006 anymore, so today, a replacement for twitter would not look like bluesky. Today twitter would look much more like nostr, maybe mastodon. Recommending bluesky in any way in this day and age doesn't sound really serious tbh. @cwebber FWIW, I'm not interested in anyone's proprietary platform, ever again. I will revert to emails and text messages and Signal. But Mastodon instances are the best response I've seen.  @cwebber I took a 2 hour nap. This is still going?!?!? You're a trooper. |
Making design decisions in the present which guard against the future is one of the most important things we can do. It is one of the most important reasons to choose FOSS licenses, for instance, which provide an exit plan and also counterbalance against temptation to enshittify a project.