Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...
@pluralistic has a new piece (https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
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Somewhere in the 1980s software companies discovered that they could announce products with fabulous features long before they were developed as a means of getting potential customers to delay purchase decisions for their competitors actual real products. The term 'vaporware' came to refer to these schemes. Over the years vaporware has evolved to be used for all sorts of clever market manipulations and you could say that most of Silicon Valley now runs on vaporware.
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Sometimes vaporware products actually get made with a small subset of the promised features, but more often they just continue to get delayed serving their market manipulative purpose. One thing about vaporware products is that there is no shortage of complex and detailed descriptions of what they WILL DO.
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Enter Bluesky and the AT protocol. We are told it is a simple matter to make Bluesky distributed. All we need to do is make another 'relay'. Seems easy, right. But Bluesky hasn't done this yet because [insert reason here]. Enter FOF, who figures, well Bluesky won't build a second relay with their technology, we will do it!
Do you see the problem here? Maybe, building complex undeveloped, unproven, untested relays is a huge engineering challenge. Maybe it's impossible.
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Certainly seems like it will be impossible without Bluesky's active involvement and support. But, the whole reason for this effort is we imagine a day where Bluesky will be the adversary and something they actively oppose. People running to the fire escapes while Bluesky is pulling up the ladders.
FOF is untenable. It's an engineering nightmare based on vaporware marketing and even if it miraculously got built it is impossible to imagine Bluesky not able to sabotage it.
References
Supporting FOF:
https://freeourfeeds.com/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/17/1110063/we-need-to-protect-the-protocol-that-runs-bluesky/ (@elipariser)
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba (@pluralistic)
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/ (@pluralistic)
Critique of FOF:
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113829076223876008
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2025/bluesky-free-our-feeds-mastodon/ (@cebedo)
https://malici.ous.computer/@shellsharks/statuses/01JHN5A9844W3SMPE2A39K0V4J (@shellsharks)
Background:
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ (@cwebber)
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/ (@cwebber)
@mastodonmigration @pluralistic that was my thought too ...if standing up a relay to create an alternative feed takes $30M, then there will only be at most a handful of them; and initially with FOF, even if it succeeds there would only be two. Wherever you have only two to five options, that's not a real, effective "fire exit", because it's trivial for those two to five parties to get together and agree on enshittification for their mutual benefit, to the detriment of users. It just doesn't seem worthwhile to hack fire exits in a corporate owned building, if instead of leading outside, they just lead to the building next door which is also owned by an extractive corporation with no real constraints.
@sspopovich @mastodonmigration @pluralistic If only people who can access $30M can stand up a Bluesky clone, that pretty much means only billionaires can do it. Not a great way to escape oligarchy-controlled social media.
@dgoldsmith @sspopovich @pluralistic
Tough to fault that logic.
Meanwhile did you see the European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRi) report which calls for "substantial" investment in public social media and in particular Mastodon and the Fediverse to counter X and Meta
https://edri.org/our-work/meta-and-x-are-going-rogue-here-is-what-europe-should-do-now/
Would be really good to see Europe get serious about this space.