this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
I don't mind people setting up for-profit businesses. After all it's what you're supposed to do in a capitalist society, but the issue with it is when company start putting profit before people. As long as they don't do that I'm not bothered that they make business-minded decisions.
The real problem begins when one has to consider how to make money from a social media platform. Selling T-shirts with sick burns written in Latin is not going to work forever.
Right... isn't the obvious response to this "holy shit, they really don't have a business model even remotely figured out here???" which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of "sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions".
This isn't difficult, it is just exhausting.
What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has....
Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can't stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.