Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and a significant amount of media attention as well. All that attention to Bluesky has also led to a renewed conversation around the question of whether Bluesky is decentralised or not. The terms decentralisation and federation are used in multiple ways: to describe the technological architecture details of an internet protocol, but just as often as a sh...
  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    492·
    1 year ago

    https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

    We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital

    In other words, the enshittification is coming. Because Bluesky is backed by crypto-bro venture capital.

    A lot of hay is being made about Bluesky but despite literal oligarchs taking over the country, I guess rich people dictating how our systems work is what people want because apparently Mastodon is too much to ask of individuals.

    We can talk about Bluesky and how great their tech is all we want, but unless we address the elephant in the room, venture capital that wants a return on their investment, we’re just spiraling the same stupid fucking drain we’ve been down with every social media preceding it.

    • lychee🍒@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      Capitalists need to be regulated (forced) to play nice, without that it’s gonna be the same song, same dance for the rest of time. And it’s not gonna happen anytime soon by the looks of things

    • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      For profit incentives are part of what made open source successful, see red hat and Suse. From what i can tell bluesky is open source and could be forked like what happened with nextcloud and lineageos. blockchain has reasonable applications .

      We could use something like codeberg for bluesky, a open source community of developers and donors that could balance the for profit entity.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    I wonder which billionaire is going to snap up bluesky once they’ve fattened their crop of highly engaged users

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      61·
      1 year ago

      They already owe their livelihoods to Blockchain Capital, and venture capital firm of crypto-bros.

      The bait is out and the switch is coming.

  • Funkwonker@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    I don’t really get all the pessimism. Even if folks are right in saying there’ll be a bait and switch, this is people moving to a new platform en masse. If Bluesky goes to shit there’s more reason to believe users would just move again.

    In the meantime, as members of the fediverse, we should be using Bluesky being “decentralized” as a way to ease people into actually decentralized platforms.

    • Jared White@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      1 year ago

      I can tell you right now nobody’s on Bluesky because it’s “decentralized” because the evidence is clear, it’s not in practice decentralized lol.

      This is all a bloody waste of time. I really wish I could just fast-forward two years into the enshittification when everyone realizes they got duped by Big VC. Again.

  • blue_berry@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Decentralisation doesn’t necessarily come with decentralized technical infrastructure, but its the basis for it. I’m still betting on ActivityPub. Sure social insentives are important, but the most openess will win. Also, Wordpress, Flipboard, Threads already joined ActivityPub, so the ecosystem already is kind of attractive in that direction.