Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about “the boring internet,” discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It’s just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put there by companies seeking to extract more and more from you. It’s a great read and here’s just a snippet:
The internet you grew up on is not gone.
Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends.
The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.
But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.
But, as Godier’s piece notes, protocols are… boring. They change slowly (for a good reason, because you need stability to build on). They tend to change by consensus, which is messy. And rather than having billion dollar companies throwing a whole massive engineering team at making everything work, in the protocol world, we rely on constant experimentation by anyone who wants to experiment.
Sometimes that produces silly things. Sometimes it produces things that only kinda work. And sometimes, it produces wonderful new things that would never have existed in a world of fully centralized services.
But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future. The important thing for people to understand, though, is that while the amazing new breakthroughs in the protocol world may not get giant headlines in the NY Times or flashy stories about trillion dollar IPOs, they are building real things for real people, in which the people are the most important part, rather than the bankers or the billionaire execs looking to get richer.
So I was excited recently to take part as a juror for the Open Social Awards, put on by New_Public and Public Spaces, reviewing a wide range of projects looking to build on open social protocols (mostly ATproto and ActivityPub). The energy among developers right now for what they can do on open social systems is real, and it’s building fast. Tim Trautmann recently wrote about this, saying “the nerds are building a new internet.” As he wrote:
The open web of the nineties didn’t win because the tools were better. It won because a critical mass of people decided that the alternative, a handful of AOL-style walled gardens choosing what everyone saw, was not the future they wanted. Then they built their way out of it. Slowly, unglamorously, in rooms that looked a lot like this one.
Whether atproto ends up being the thing, or a stepping stone to the thing, I don’t know. Nobody in the room claimed to know. But the work is real, the apps are shipping, and the people building them are taking it seriously without taking themselves seriously. That combination is rare, and historically, it’s the one that wins.
You can see that kind of excitement as well in this recent video of a bunch of developers doing an ATproto hackathon, where you see people realizing in real time how powerful ATproto is in allowing you to build a better internet:
It’s so easy these days to get down on the state of the larger internet, increasingly controlled by bigger and bigger companies trying to extract more and more from you. But if you look beneath all of that, genuinely interesting, important things are being built, some of which was celebrated at the Open Social Awards last week.
The grand prize winner was the Newsmast Foundation, which has been helping mission-driven organizations build their own social spaces online, using ActivityPub. They’ve been building some amazing community apps for news organizations, non-profits, and more. Enabling those organizations to have their own social spaces, but built on top of an open protocol.
The two “Excellence Award” winners were equally strong — there was a real argument that either of them could have taken the grand prize. First there’s Blacksky Algorithms, which has built out an entirely separate and differentiated ATproto experience, where thousands of users can have a social media experience interoperable with Bluesky and others on the network, but without ever touching Bluesky hardware or software. The company keeps doing really fascinating things as well, including its use of pol.is for community decision-making, and offering up its ability to build entirely independent ATproto powered communities to others via Acorn.
And there’s one of my personal favorites, Sill, which is a wonderful cross-protocol newsreader app. You login with your Atmosphere (ATproto) handle and/or your ActivityPub handle, and it will find the news that is being discussed among your followers and format it in a nice digest format. I use it as a daily review of what’s happening in the world that’s interesting to me.
And then all of the “honorable mentions” were doing interesting things as well, figuring out ways to make open social more useful: Bounce (a tool for migrating between AcitivtyPub and ATproto while bringing your community with you, from the team who also does BridgyFed, a tool for communicating across protocols). Dandelion, an events platform built on ATproto. Streamplace, which does video streaming on ATproto. Leaflet, which has become one of the go to places for long form blogging within the ATproto world, and Bonfire Networks, which is also working on helping communities build their own communities online.
There were many other entries as well, and the energy developers are bringing to open social projects right now is genuinely contagious. People are learning that they can just build stuff, and specifically the kind of stuff that you had to rely on the goodwill (or perhaps commercial agreements) of a large company to build.
Every day there are more creative new ideas showing up. The one thing I’m looking forward to most is when we start to break out of the “rebuilding this centralized service on open protocols” and finally get to the point where we get entirely new things that are only possible because of open protocols. This is how these things have always worked. A new medium first gets used to rebuild familiar things — almost as a way of learning how the underlying system operates. Then come the breakthroughs that are only possible because of that new medium. If I had one complaint about the entries this year, it’s that too many of them felt like rebuilding the old things, just on a protocol.
We’re already starting to see small examples, though, of what it looks like when we go to the next stage, and it’s not just “this service, but without centralized control” to “we can function entirely differently without centralized control.” That’s just starting to happen, but I expect we’ll see many more examples in the near future.
In the meantime, congrats to the winners (and all the entrants) of the first ever Open Social Awards.
If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshittified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off one by one without the protections offered by 230.
The internet as we know it is built on Section 230, a law from the 90s that generally says internet users are legally responsible for their own speech — not the services hosting their speech. The purpose of 230 was to enable diverse forums for speech online, which defined the early internet. These scattered online communities have since been largely captured by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies that found profit in controlling your voice online. While critics are rightly concerned about this new corporate influence and surveillance, some look to diminishing Section 230 as the nuclear option to regain control.
The thing is, that would be a huge gift to Big Tech, and detrimental to our best shot at actually undermining corporate and state control of speech online.
Dethroning Big Tech
We’re fed up with legacy social media trapping us in walled gardens, where the world’s biggest companies like Google and Meta call the shots. Our communities, and our voices, are being held hostage as billionaires’ platforms surveil, betray, and censor us. We’re not alone in this frustration, and fortunately, people are collaborating globally to build another way forward: the Open Social Web.
This new infrastructure puts the public’s interest first by reclaiming the principles of interoperability and decentralization from the early internet. In short, it puts protocols over platforms and lets people own their connections with others. Whether you choose a Fediverse app like Mastodon or an ATmosphere app like Bluesky, your audience and community stay within reach. It’s a vision of social media akin to our lives offline: you decide who to be in touch with and how, and no central authority can threaten to snuff out those connections. It’s social media for humans, not advertisers and authoritarians.
Behind that vision is a beautiful mess of protocols bringing the open social media web to life. Each protocol is a unique language for applications, determining how and where messages are sent. While this means there is great variety to these projects, it also means everyone who spins up a server, develops an app, or otherwise hosts others’ speech has skin in the game when it comes to defending Section 230.
What exactly is Section 230?
Section 230 protects freedom of expression online by protecting US intermediaries that make the internet work. Passed in 1996 to preserve the new bubbling communities online, 230 enshrined important protections for free expression and the ability to block or filter speech you don’t want on your site. One portion is credited as the “26 words that created the internet”:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
In other words, this bipartisan law recognizes that speech online relies on intermediaries — services that deliver messages between users — and holding them potentially liable for any message they deliver would only stifle that speech. Intuitively, when harmful speech occurs, the speaker should be the one held accountable. The effect is that most civil suits against users and services based on others’ speech can quickly be dismissed, avoiding the most expensive parts of civil litigation.
Section 230 was never a license to host anything online, however. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims.
What Section 230 has enabled, however, is the freedom and flexibility for online communities to self-organize. Without the specter of one bad actor exposing the host(s) to serious legal threats, intermediaries can moderate how they see fit or even defer to volunteers within these communities.
Why the Open Social Web Needs Section 230
The superpower of decentralized systems like the Fediverse is the ability for thousands of small hosts to each shoulder some of the burdens of hosting. No single site can assert itself as a necessary intermediary for everyone; instead, all must collaborate to ensure messages reach the intended audience. The result is something superior to any one design or mandate. It is an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts, resilient to disruptions, and free to experiment with different approaches to community governance.
The open social web’s kryptonite though, is the liability participants can face as intermediaries. The greater the potential liability, the more interference from powerful interests in the form of legal threats, more monetary costs, and less space for nuance in moderation. And in practice, participants may simply stop hosting to avoid those risks. The end result is only the biggest and most resourced options can survive.
This isn’t just about the hosts in the Open Social Web, like Mastodon instances or Bluesky PDSes. In the U.S., Section 230’s protections extend to internet users when they distribute another person’s speech. For example, Section 230 protects a user who forwards an email with a defamatory statement. On the open social web, that means when you pass along a message to others through sharing, boosting, and quoting, you’re not liable for the other user’s speech. The alternative would be a web where one misclick could open you up to a defamation lawsuit.
Section 230 also applies to the infrastructure stack, too, like Internet service providers, content delivery networks, domain, and hosting providers. Protections even extend to the new experimental infrastructures of decentralized mesh networks.
Beyond the existential risks to the feasibility of indie decentralized projects in the United States, weakening 230 protections would also make services worse. Being able to customize your social media experience from highly curated to totally laissez-faire in the open social web is only possible when the law allows space for private experiments in moderation approaches. The algorithmically driven firehose forced on users by antiquated social media giants is driven by the financial interests of advertisers, and would only be more tightly controlled in a post-230 world.
Defending 230
Laws aimed at changing 230 protections put decentralized projects like the open social web in a uniquely precarious position. That is why we urge lawmakers to take careful consideration of these impacts. It is also why the proponents and builders of a better web must be vigilant defenders of the legal tools that make their work possible.
The open social web embodies what we are protecting with Section 230. It’s our best chance at building a truly democratic public interest internet, where communities are in control.
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users.
Last month, I helped release the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which laid out a vision for technology that empowers users rather than extracting from them. The response was gratifying—people are genuinely hungry for an alternative to the current enshittification trajectory of tech. But the most common piece of feedback we got was some version of: “Okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually build this?”
It’s a fair question. Manifestos are cheap if they don’t connect to reality.
So here’s my answer, at least for anything involving social identity: build on the ATProtocol. It’s the only available system today that actually delivers on the resonant computing principles, and it’s ready to use right now.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto laid out five principles for building technology that works for people:
Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it’s used.
Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.
If you’re building anything that involves users having identities, connecting with other users, or creating content that belongs to them—which describes basically every interesting app—you need infrastructure that makes these principles achievable rather than aspirational.
ATproto delivers all five.
Private and Dedicated come down to who controls your data. In the current paradigm, you’re rows in somebody else’s database, and they can do whatever they want with those rows. Dan Abramov, in his excellent explainer on open social systems, describes the problem perfectly:
The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave is to leave it behind.
On an individual level, it might not be a huge deal.
Alice can rebuild her social presence connection by connection somewhere else. Eventually she might even have the same reach as on the previous platform.
However, collectively, the net effect is that social platforms—at first, gradually, and then suddenly—turn their backs on their users. If you can’t leave without losing something important, the platform has no incentives to respect you as a user.
With ATproto, your data lives in your own “personal repository” (the PDS)—think of it as your own storage container on the social web. You can host it with a free service (like Bluesky), a paid provider, or on your own server. If your current host turns evil or just annoys you, you pack up and move without losing your identity, your connections, or any of your content. The protocol handles the redirection automatically.
This isn’t theoretical. People are doing it right now. The infrastructure exists. You can literally move your entire social presence from one host to another and nobody who follows you needs to update anything (or even realize that you’ve moved).
You don’t need to figure out ways to extract data from an unwilling billionaire’s silo. It’s already yours.
And that’s beneficial for developers as well. If you’re trying to build a system, setting up the identity and social connections creates all sorts of challenges (and dangerous temptations) regarding how you deal with other people’s data, and what games you might play to try to juice the numbers. But with ATproto, the incentives are aligned. Users control their own data, their own connections, and you can just provide a useful service on top of that.
Plural is baked into the architecture. Because your identity isn’t tied to any single app or platform, you can use multiple apps that all read from and write to your personal repository. Abramov explains this clearly in that same post:
Each open social app is like a CMS (content management system) for a subset of data that lives in its users’ repositories. In that sense, your personal repository serves a role akin to a Google account, a Dropbox folder, or a Git repository, with data from your different open social apps grouped under different “subfolders”.
When you make a post on Bluesky, Bluesky puts that post into your repo:
When you star a project on Tangled, Tangled puts that star into your repo:
When you create a publication on Leaflet, Leaflet puts it into your repo:
You get the idea.
Over time, your repo grows to be a collection of data from different open social apps. This data is open by default—if you wanted to look at my Bluesky posts, or Tangled stars, or Leaflet publications, you wouldn’t need to hit these applications’ APIs. You could just hit my personal repository and enumerate all of its records.
This is the opposite of how closed platforms work. You’re not locked into any single company’s vision of what social software should be. Different apps can disagree about what a “post” is—different products, different vibes—and that’s a feature, not a bug. Your identity travels with you across all of them.
Indeed, we’re seeing some really cool stuff around this lately, such as with the new standard.site lexicon for long form publishing on ATproto. It’s been adopted by Leaflet, Pckt, and Offprint, with others likely to come on board as well.
Tynan Purdy, writing via the brand new Offprint (itself an ATproto app), captures the mindset shift that I think more developers need to internalize:
I have no more patience for platforms. I’m done.
Products come and go. This is a truism of the internet. Do not expect any particular service to exist forever, or you will be burned. It can be a depressing thought. So much of our lives are lived online. Communities and culture are created online. The play is performed on stages we call “social media”. But then they go away.
We make our homes on these platforms. Set up shop. Scale a business. Connect with our friends. Build a following. Then something changes. A change in corporate strategy. An IPO. A private equity takeover. A merger with AOL. And it’s never the same after that. All that work, all that culture, now painted in a different light. Sometimes locked away entirely.
His solution? Never build on closed platforms again:
I write to you now on a new kind of place on the internet. This place is mine. Or rather, what I create here is mine. This product (a rather fine one by @btrs.coif I say so myself), belongs to @offprint.app. They might go away. Someday they will. But this, my words, my creation. The human act of creating culture. This is mine. It lives in my personal folder. I keep my personal folder at @selfhosted.social. They will go away someday too, and that’s okay. I’ll move my folder somewhere else. You’ll still be able to read this. Offprint is just an app for reading a certain kind of post I publish to the ATmosphere. When Offprint inevitably dies, hopefully a long time from now, this post will still just be a file in my personal folder. And when that day comes, perhaps even before, there will be other ways to read this file from my personal folder. You can even do so right now.
That’s not idealism. That’s how ATproto actually works today.
Purdy mentions above his “personal folder” and in another post Abramov digs deeper into what that means:
This might sound very hypothetical, but it’s not. What I’ve described so far is the premise behind the AT protocol. It works in production at scale. Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, Semble, and Wisp are some of the new open social apps built this way.
It doesn’t feel different to use those apps. But by lifting user data out of the apps, we force the same separation as we’ve had in personal computing: apps don’t trap what you make with them. Someone can always make a new app for old data:
Like before, app developers evolve their file formats. However, they can’t gatekeep who reads and writes files in those formats. Which apps to use is up to you.
Together, everyone’s folders form something like a distributed social filesystem:
This is a fundamentally different relationship between users and services. And it breaks the economic logic that makes platforms turn against their users.
It’s an enshittification killswitch.
Cory Doctorow’s framing of enshittification notes that the demands (often from investors) for companies to extract more and more pushes them to enshittify. Once they have you in their silo, they can begin to turn the screws on you. They know that it’s costly for you to leave. You lose your contacts. Your content. Your community. The switching costs are the leverage.
ATproto breaks that leverage.
Because you control your data, your identity, and your connections, whichever services you’re using have strong incentives to never enshittify. Turn the screws and users just… leave. Click a button, move to a different service, take everything with them. The threat that makes enshittification profitable—”where else are you gonna go?”—has no teeth when the answer is “literally anywhere, and I’m taking my stuff.”
Paul Frazee, Bluesky’s CTO, talks about how this works in a post he recently did on the concept of “Atmospheric Computing.”
Connected clouds solve a lot of problems. You still have the always-on convenience, but you can also store your own data and run your own programs. It’s personal computing, for the cloud.
The main benefit is interoperation.
You signed up to Bluesky. You can just use that account on Leaflet. Both of them are on the Atmosphere.
If Leaflet decides to show Bluesky posts, they just can. If Leaflet decides to create Bluesky posts, they just need to use the right schema. The two apps don’t need to talk to directly to do it. They both just talk to the users’ account hosts.
Cooperative computing is possible.
The most popular algorithm on Bluesky is For You. It’s run by Spacecowboy on *squints* his gaming PC.
He ingests the firehose of public posts and likes and follows. Then the Bluesky app asks his server for a list of post URLs to render. The shared dataset means we can do deeply cooperative computing. An entirely third party service presents itself as first-party to Bluesky.
Because Tangled is Atmospheric, your self-hosted instance would see all of the same users and user activity as the first instance would.
The garden is unwalled.
SelfHosted.social is an account hosting service. The self-hosted users show up like any other user. If I had to guess, most of them started on Bluesky hosts, and then used something like PDS Moover to migrate.
It’s an open network.
In the Atmosphere, it does make sense to run a personal cloud, because your personal cloud can interoperate with other people’s personal clouds. It can also interoperate with BobbyCorp’s Big Bob Cloud, and the corner pie shop’s Pie Cloud, and on it goes.
There’s no silo to lock you in, and thus trying to turn the screws on users should backfire. Instead, services built on ATproto have “resonant” incentives, to keep you happy, to keep you feeling good about using the service, because it enables a plurality of other services as well.
In many ways it’s a rethinking of the entire web itself and how it can and should work. The web was supposed to be interoperable and buildable, but all our data and identity pieces got locked away in silos.
ATproto breaks all that down, and just lets people build. And connect. And share.
Adaptable is where the developer ecosystem comes in. Because the protocol is open and the data formats are extensible, anyone can build whatever they want. We’re already seeing this explosion right now: Bluesky for microblogging, Leaflet for long-form publishing, Tangled for code collaboration, Offprint for newsletters, Roomy for community discussions, Skylight for shortform video, Semble for organizing research, teal.fm for music scrobbling and dozens more. Some of these are mere “copycats” of existing services, but we’re already starting to see some others that are branching out beyond what was even possible before.
The key: these apps don’t just coexist—they can actively benefit from each other’s data. Abramov again:
Since the data from different apps “lives together”, there’s a much lower barrier for open social apps to piggyback on each other’s data. In a way, it starts to feel like a connected multiverse of apps, with data from one app “bleeding into” other apps.
When I signed up for Tangled, I chose to use my existing @danabra.mov handle. That makes sense since identity can be shared between open social apps. What’s more interesting is that Tangled prefilled my avatar based on my Bluesky profile. It didn’t need to hit the Bluesky API to do that; it just read the Bluesky profile record in my repository. Every app can choose to piggyback on data from other apps.
An everything app tries to do everything the way they tell you to do it. An everything protocol-based ecosystem lets everything get done. How you want. Now how some billionaire wants.
It’s becoming part of the motto of the Atmosphere: we can just do things. Anyone can. For years I’ve written about how much learned helplessness people have regarding social systems—thinking their only option is to beg billionaires or the government to fix things. But there’s a third way: just build. And build together. That’s what ATproto enables.
And it’s doable today. Yes, there are reasonable concerns about the hype machine around AI and vibe coding—but the flip side is that in the last couple of months, I, a non-professional coder, have built myself three separate things using ATproto. Including a Google Reader-style app that mixes RSS and ATproto together. That’s what “adaptable” actually means: tools malleable enough that regular people with little to no experience can shape them to their needs. The vibe coding revolution will enable even more people to just build what they want, and they can use ATproto as a foundational layer of that.
This used to be close to impossible. The big centralized platforms learned to lock everything down—sometimes suing those who sought to build better tools. ATproto doesn’t have that problem. We don’t need permission. We can just do things. Today. And with new AI-powered tools, it’s easier than ever for anyone to do so.
Prosocial is where this all comes together. Not “social” in the Zuckerbergian sense of harvesting your social graph to sell ads, but social in the human sense: enabling connection and coordination between people, without a controlling body in the middle looking to exploit those connections. The identity layer handles the hard problems—authentication, verification, portability—so developers (or, really, anyone—see the adaptable section) can focus on building things that actually help people connect.
Remember why people flocked to social media in the early years? They got genuine value out of it. Connecting with friends and family, new and old. But once the centralized systems had you trapped, those social tools became extraction tools.
The open social architecture of the Atmosphere means that trap can’t close. We can engage in prosocial activities without fear of bait-and-switch—without worrying that the useful feature we love is just bait to drag our data and connections into someone’s locked pen.
The protocol itself is politically neutral infrastructure, like email or the web. The point isn’t any particular app—it’s that we finally have a foundation for building social tools that don’t require users to surrender control of their digital lives.
If you’re building an app that needs user identity, or user-generated content, or any kind of social graph, you don’t have to build all that infrastructure yourself. You don’t have to trap your users’ data in your own database (and worry about the associated risks). You don’t have to make them create yet another account and remember yet another password. You can just plug into ATproto’s identity layer and get all of the resonant computing principles essentially for free.
Your users keep control of their identity. Their data stays under their control, but available to the wider ecosystem. Your app becomes part of that larger ecosystem rather than just another walled garden, meaning you’ve also solved part of the cold start problem. Over 40 million people already have an account that works on whatever it is that you’ve built. And if your app dies—let’s be honest, most apps die—the data and connections your users created don’t die with it.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto talked about technology that leaves people “feeling nourished, grateful, alive” rather than “depleted, manipulated, or just vaguely dirty.” That kind of technology can’t exist when the fundamental architecture treats users as resources to be extracted. But it can exist when users control their own data, when developers can build without permission, when leaving doesn’t mean losing everything.
That’s not a future we need to wait for. That’s ATproto. Today.
So when people ask “how do I actually build resonant computing?” this is a key part of the answer. Stop building on platforms. Stop begging billionaires to be better. Stop waiting for regulators to save you.
The tools are here. The infrastructure exists. We can just do things.
When 1,700 people pack a room at SXSW (with hundreds more relegated to overflow spaces) to hear about a decentralized social media protocol, it’s clear something interesting is happening. The crowd that showed up for my conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week wasn’t just there for another social media platform — they were there because they’re hungry for an alternative to billionaire-controlled (and manipulated) digital spaces.
As a reminder, I’m on the board at Bluesky, so I’m biased. However, I did try to ask Jay many of the questions I frequently hear about Bluesky, including why it’s different than other social media companies, how it thinks about content moderation and toxicity, and whether or not it’s really “billionaire proof” as the company claims (I prefer “billionaire resistant.”)
The full video and audio are both online if you want to listen.
The crux of the argument for Bluesky — and the whole reason I proposed the idea that later became Bluesky — was exactly this: to give more choice to everyone. To push the power to the ends of the network, rather than hoarding it in the middle where it can be used to manipulate and control. As Jay notes during the talk, it’s about giving everyone the ability to “choose your own adventure” on social media, enabling more pro-social outcomes.
This isn’t just theoretical anymore. While major platforms continue their descent into “enshittification,” Bluesky is demonstrating that there’s a real appetite for putting user choice and empowerment first. The millions of people already using the service aren’t just passive consumers — they’re actively engaging with and building upon the underlying ATprotocol, creating new experiences and tools without asking anyone’s permission, and without being controlled by anyone.
And while there’s still a ways to go to get fully to that point, I think that Jay and her team have made amazing strides towards that vision, and we’re seeing lots of other efforts to build towards that vision as well — exactly the kind of permissionless innovation the ATprotocol was designed to enable.
If you’re in London on Thursday 30th January, join Ben, Mark Scott (Digital Politics) and Georgia Iacovou (Horrific/Terrific) for an evening of tech policy, discussion and drinks. Register your interest.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Disclosure:I’m onthe board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky.
There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how decentralized it really is. There has also been a growing fear that “enshittification is inevitable.” Or, worse, that an “evil billionaire” might take it over and ruin it the way other platforms have been ruined.
But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.
Last week, a group called Free Our Feeds announced itself to the world and kicked off a crowdfunding process to effectively build a Bluesky competitor, built on the same ATprotocol and fully interoperable with Bluesky, but wholly separate from the app.
This is both exciting and fantastic, in part because it’s cool, and in part because it demonstrates the real-world impact and importance of ATprotocol’s open design, showing how it enables the creation of alternative infrastructure that can prevent lock-in and empower users.
The Enshittification Fear:
For a few years now, Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” has been a hot topic in tech circles, with many worried that even the most well-intentioned platforms are doomed to become terrible over time.
Indeed, just a few months ago, Cory wrote a thoughtful piece about why he was not joining Bluesky and why he feared it was on the path to enshittification. He and I had actually discussed all of this much earlier (very early in Bluesky’s history) and I suggested to him that Bluesky had some tricks up its sleeve to be enshittification-resistant. In the piece, Cory says some very nice things about me before (correctly!) saying that even though he trusts me deeply, he doesn’t think that his trust of me (and me being on Bluesky’s board) means Bluesky is immune to the enshittification curve:
Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her. At least one of the board members there, Mike Masnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don’t agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.
But even the best boards can make bad calls.
And he’s correct. The best boards can make bad calls. And I can certainly make bad calls.
But the secret behind Bluesky was not that it has an amazing CEO or a non-evil board. It’s that it was built from the ground up with a focus on forced openness and a protocol on which anyone could build. I discussed this in great detail a few months ago on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast.
The key points:
Nothing can be enshittification-proof, but you can make things enshittification resistant.
The key to doing so is building on a forced-open protocol, such that if people hate what you’re doing, they’re able to rebuild any part of the infrastructure and cut out the entity engaged in enshittification.
Even if the alternative competing services don’t exist, the simple fact that the option is there for people to keep their content, keep their relationships, keep their ability to communicate while avoiding any particular platform, is a very strong incentive to resist enshittification.
This is because even the looming possibility that someone can come in, piggyback on the existing network, but with their own infrastructure, creates incredibly strong incentives for any player in the space to avoid giving reasons to people to leave.
Going back to Cory’s original formulation of “enshittification,” I can explain this further:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
In traditional, centralized systems that shift away from being good to users to being good to their business customers is where the slide begins. For traditional companies, though, they can get away with it, because users are “stuck.” As Cory well knows from his work on adversarial interoperability, the real problem is lock-in.
Once a platform has you, it can start to squeeze you if you have nowhere else to go. And, in the case of social media, that’s particularly tricky, because you want to be where your social graph is, so once you’ve really built up connections, a platform has you.
But if the network is based on an open protocol, in which alternative infrastructure can be built, then any player in the system has a greatly diminished incentive to start being bad to users in favor of other constituents, because the worse you get for users, the more opportunity there is for someone else to jump in and offer something better.
I think that many people, though not necessarily Cory, have zeroed in on the idea of “VC funding” as the root cause of enshittification, rather than the lock-in. And it is true that some VCs might be looking to invest only in centralized platforms that have built-in lock-in, but it’s possible to recognize an alternative approach to building a sustainable business: by treating users well, allowing everyone to build on the same open network, and recognizing that this makes the whole system more valuable to everyone.
That’s what Bluesky is trying to do with the ATprotocol.
The company has said from the beginning that “Bluesky” itself is just a reference app, and the point is for others to build. Indeed, part of the company’s own mission is that “the company is a future adversary.”
As Cory notes, no CEO or board can protect against that. But building an open network that enables third parties to build every bit of the stack as alternatives does help protect against that.
Free Our Feeds!
And now it’s happening. With the launch of Free Our Feeds, which is running a crowdfunding project and looking to raise $30 million over the next three years, we’re seeing that fully independent infrastructure on the path to being built. And hopefully they won’t be the only ones.
The plan is to build entirely separate infrastructure, but all using the ATprotocol, so that anyone on Bluesky (or other ATproto services) can interoperate with the new service.
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
This isn’t just about bolstering one new social media platform. Our vision offers a pathway to an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any company or billionaire.
And, notably, among the names signed on to support it is Cory Doctorow, which is exciting to see.
This ability to build alternative infrastructure is possible (despite Cory’s fears in his piece), it just takes resources. Cory talked about the lack of “federation” in his piece, suggesting that Bluesky had somehow failed to “federate”:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
And while it is true that Bluesky is, currently, the only source for some aspects of the ATprotocol stack, it has been built so that the other parts can be replicated elsewhere. Admittedly, some of it is more complicated than other parts, but it is possible.
And that’s what the new Free Our Feeds effort is trying to do.
So while Cory was worried that this was something Bluesky had refused to do, the reality is that the possibility of doing this has been there for a while. The problem is that it’s not simple. And it needed someone else to come along and build what was open for them to build.
Because if Bluesky built it itself, then it’s not a third party that is independent. It’s still Bluesky. And that’s why Free Our Feeds is so exciting. They’re proving that a third party can build out a system entirely independent of Bluesky, the company. And, admittedly, building the full stack is not cheap, which explains why Free Our Feeds is working towards an ambitious funding goal.
The ability for a third party like Free Our Feeds to build an entirely separate system while still allowing users to communicate across apps is the key to ATprotocol’s “technological poison pill” effect. Even if Bluesky or another provider tries to act against users’ interests, people can seamlessly shift to an alternative without losing access to their social graph and data. This creates a powerful counterweight to the usual lock-in and network effects that enable enshittification.
The Company is a Future Adversary
And this is where it’s important to understand some of the fundamental differences in how something like Bluesky/ATproto works and something like Mastodon/ActivityPub work. They have a slightly different approach to trying to tackle the same problem. Each are trying to create decentralized, protocol-based social media tools, but they take a fundamentally different approach.
ActivityPub works on the theory that almost anyone can effectively build and host “their own” mini-Twitter-like service. And then that mini-Twitter can speak to many of the other mini-Twitters, with the ability of any of them to “defederate” (or block all communications) with other mini-Twitters, as needed.
That defederation aspect is a unique (and fascinating!) kind of incentivizing tool, as platforms that want to be good neighbors have incentives to police their own mini-Twitters. But it also creates some challenges. It’s tough to run your own mini-Twitter, especially if you allow more than just yourself to use it. There’s a fair bit of work involved. And then managing users, managing which servers you defederate from, etc., is a chore.
The ATProtocol approach is somewhat different. You can federate some aspects of things, such as hosting all your own data on your own PDS or Personal Data Server (which is great, as it means you have full control over your data, not Bluesky or anyone else), but it’s not designed for a random individual to spin up an entire mini-Twitter.
The philosophy is more that different parts of the stack may require different players to be involved, and some of them may require more resources than others. Running your own PDS is relatively inexpensive and easy. Running your own relay is more challenging and expensive but wouldn’t necessarily need a corporation. Other pieces require more, and that’s what Free Our Feeds appears to be building.
And, again, the most important bit is that this is always possible on this network. Because “the company is a future adversary.”
Bluesky’s approach directly addresses the enshittification fear by ensuring that no single entity, not even Bluesky itself, can gain too much control over the network. The open protocol acts as a check on any potential abuse of power.
The fact that Free Our Feeds can do this in the first place is almost more important than whether or not they actually succeed (which I hope they do!), because it creates strong incentives for Bluesky, the corporate entity, not to enshittify.
Indeed, if you look back at the history of Twitter, in the early days, it encouraged open development and building, but it wasn’t a protocol where the entire stack could be recreated. And, when one entity started buying up many of the independent developers with a pretty explicit plan to “steal away” all of Twitter’s users, Twitter started locking stuff up and blocking that ability, because there wasn’t an open protocol and there wasn’t any possibility of rebuilding certain parts of the infrastructure.
In contrast, Bluesky was built from the ground up for this very thing. And you can see that difference in how the Bluesky team has reacted to Free Our Feeds: many employees, including top management, are cheering on the Free Our Feeds team even as, ostensibly, they’re building “a competitor.”
Exciting to see new, independent projects spin up to decentralize the atproto ecosystem! Building alternative infrastructure is a big step towards giving users more choice and making the network billionaire-proof.
Free Our Feeds! What is it! @freeourfeeds.comF.O.F. is an independent group with the goal of running THIS👇 social network totally outside of Bluesky.It's not us. It's a fully independent version of the network. All the same users and posts. Running cooperatively with us and others.
very excited to have other large players taking the decentralization of atproto infrastructure seriouslylooking forward to seeing what comes out of this!
This sincere welcoming of potential “competitors” is practically unheard of in the tech world. But it reflects a fundamentally different mindset enforced by the open protocol, one focused on growing the pie for everyone rather than jealously guarding a slice. It’s a recognition that, in a world of open protocols, a rising tide can lift all boats.
Of course, some may argue that the technical complexity and costs involved in building out alternative infrastructure will still limit how many can truly compete with dominant players, even with an open protocol. And that’s a fair point. Spinning up a full social media stack is no trivial task, as the $30 million Free Our Feeds campaign underscores.
But the key is that it’s possible, and that possibility acts as a check on bad behavior. Moreover, as a robust ecosystem emerges around the protocol, we can expect to see more tools and services that lower the barriers to entry. Already, the rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATProtocol hint at a future where a vibrant alternative tech scene, with empowered users, can thrive.
It’s a recognition that, in the networked world, this can be a non-zero-sum situation, and having more players building makes it better for everyone. It also allows for different kinds of experiments, which will create more features that more people are interested in. It’s an approach that is focused on making sure the whole ecosystem grows, rather than one company’s fiefdom.
Get Busy Building
Along those lines, there’s been a lot more development going on elsewhere as well, which is equally exciting. In just the last week, there’s been talk of independent developers building an Instagram competitor and a TikTok competitor on ATprotocol. That last one, by the way, was built in just a few hours. That’s what can happen when you have an open system. Over the weekend, Bluesky itself added to this by soft launching a new view that gives the service a TikTok-like feel. But, again, in an open way such that others can build algorithms and feeds for a similar video-only feed.
Similarly, Flipboard recently released an amazingly slick brand new app, called Surf, that works with both ATprotocol and ActivityPub (and RSS!!) to create a very cool tool for browsing, consuming, sharing, and creating posts across all of these networks. And last week, right after the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban, Flipboard’s CEO/co-founder Mike McCue showed off SkyTok, a quickly created feed (using Surf) that creates a simple TikTok-like experience. And, over the weekend, they tested SkyTok with Bluesky’s new video rendering setup as well.
And people are taking notice. Famed entrepreneur/investor Mark Cuban put out a call for proposals, saying he’d like to fund a TikTok competitor built on ATProtocol, so I imagine the links above won’t be the only examples of people building cool stuff.
Most of these alternative apps are really building different looks at Bluesky’s implementation of ATprotocol, rather than a fully independent stack. Think of it as services that build on-top of Gmail. But that’s also why the Free Our Feeds effort is so cool. It’s like someone is coming along and building an Outlook to compete with Gmail. And, assuming they’re successful, these alternative apps (like the TikTok-style apps) should be able to easily work with it as well. Or any other third party that builds out the infrastructure.
This is a case where the more people building on this open protocol and open network, the more it helps everyone.
And, it does so in a way that is still easy for people to use. Most users don’t need to know any of this is happening, or about ATprotocol in the background. It’s just creating the kind of more open web that we all need, without the lock-in.
Again, it’s that lock-in that creates the eventual enshittification. Without lock-in, any app could still enshittify, but the risks for that app would be much bigger, because it’s so easy for users to exit. It won’t be like leaving Twitter for Bluesky where you are effectively “starting over,” it will basically be “Oh, I don’t like how Bluesky is acting, so I’m just switching over to the Free Our Feeds system” where… you don’t lose any of your posts (they’re in your own PDS), you don’t lose any of your connections (your social graph is really yours), and you remain in full control.
This is what the early internet promised us, but it got lost in the early 2000s when big companies came along and effectively colonized open protocols (or recreated them as closed silos with nicer user interfaces). This time around, though, people are learning to create user-friendly interfaces with open protocols.
From Ulysses Pacts to Technological Poison Pills
In Cory’s piece, he talks about the concept of the Ulysses Pact, which is what he requires of any new service:
There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact.
He argued that Bluesky didn’t have that because it hadn’t “federated.” But it had. It had locked the protocol open so that anyone could build. And now they are.
I think a better way of thinking about this isn’t the “Ulysses Pact,” but rather a technological poison pill. I had seen some people saying on Bluesky that the company needed to create some sort of “poison pill” in its financial setup to ward off evil potential buyers who might “make an offer they can’t refuse.”
But what Bluesky has done with ATproto is even better: it’s not relying on some financial contract. It’s created a technological poison pill, such that even if Bluesky (the company) was offered a deal it couldn’t refuse, others could just rebuild the stack… outside of Bluesky’s control (but where users could continue to communicate with each other), and Bluesky could do nothing to stop them.
Beyond enabling the “easy exit” Cory wants, it also acts to ward off “evil billionaires,” because as soon as they act evil, the poison pill is there to give everyone an escape route, thereby effectively destroying any evil billionaire’s plans. An evil billionaire has less reason to be evil in the first place since alternatives can spring up and users can exit without cost.
The “Ulysses Pact” here is in the setup. Evil billionaires and enshittification become self-defeating, thanks to the poison pill. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Because you never know what bad decisions some future version (future adversary) might make. But the nature of the locked open protocol means that it’s much easier to deal with that, and that simple fact should hopefully disincentivize any attempts in the first place.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect individual users; it has the potential to reshape the fundamental dynamics of the social web. By reducing the power of walled gardens and returning control to users, an ecosystem of open protocols could realign the incentives of technology companies, ensuring that they prioritize serving their users’ interests to remain competitive. It would mark a major shift back towards the original decentralized vision of the internet.
The rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATprotocol are not just exciting for their own sake. They hint at a future where a vibrant ecosystem of interoperable “small tech” can thrive, with a diverse range of user-centric services emerging to meet different needs. Rather than being limited to a handful of monolithic platforms, internet users could enjoy a rich marketplace of apps and services, all built on shared open standards.
That’s the vision I had with my Protocols, not Platforms paper, and now it’s on its way to being truly real. Having the Free Our Feeds folks jump in is not just proof that this is possible, it’s a vote of confidence for the overall setup, and shows how we can actually build enshittification-resistant systems by locking them open as a technological poison pill against lock-in and against the threats of evil billionaires.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect users; it will fundamentally reshape the dynamics of the social web. It will bring us back towards the original promise of the open web where users are in control, rather than giant companies. Companies will still have a place, but the job of platforms will be to serve the users’ best interests first and foremost.
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.
But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.
I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:
As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:
What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.
At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.
Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.
Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”
But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.
The more I dig into Bluesky, and more importantly the AT Protocol, the more I get that feeling I had when I first got involved with the Kubernetes project.
But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.
Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.
The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.
As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.
Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.
In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.
The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.
I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.
Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.
I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.
I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world.
In the nearly three decades that I’ve been writing Techdirt I’ve been writing about what is happening in the world of the internet, but also about how much better the internet can be. That won’t change. I will still be writing about what is happening and where I believe we should be going. But given that there are now people trying to turn some of that better vision into a reality, I cannot resist this opportunity to help them achieve that goal.
The early internet had tremendous promise as a decentralized system that enabled anyone to build what they wanted on a global open network, opening up all sorts of possibilities for human empowerment and creativity.
But over the last couple of decades, the internet has moved away from that democratizing promise. Instead, it has been effectively taken over by a small number of giant companies with centralized, proprietary, closed systems that have supplanted the more open network we were promised.
There are, of course, understandable reasons why those centralized systems have been successful, such as by providing a more user-friendly experience on the front-end. But there was a price to pay: losing user autonomy, privacy and the benefits of decentralization (not to mention losing a highly dynamic, competitive internet).
The internet need not be so limited, and over the years I’ve tried to encourage people and companies to make different choices to return to the original promise and benefits of openness. With Bluesky, we now have one company who is trying.
For me to get involved with Bluesky now, to help its efforts, is a logical next step, given how we got here. Nine years ago, right here on Techdirt, I wrote about a “half-baked” idea of separating out the “protocol” of social media from the companies providing social media services. And, almost exactly five years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University published my much deeper dive on “Protocols, Not Platforms.”
That paper laid out a more complete (though still not fully baked) theory of how a decentralized, protocol-based social media system might work to create a better (though not perfect) world for online speech. It would be a world where we retain the lessons we’ve learned about from giant, centralized players about how to make platforms so user-friendly, but which brings back the promises of user autonomy, privacy, competition, and empowerment.
I’ve been clear all along that such an approach can never solve all problems, because that’s impossible. But it could create a better framework and better incentives for a better, more open internet, where user control is more important and impactful than centralized control. As power over the online experience moves to the ends of the network, rather than the center, it allows for more expression, more creativity, and more solutions that everyone is now free to develop and use.
That 2019 paper received plenty of attention, and many people reached out to say they wanted to make that vision a reality. But the most serious and thoughtful person I spoke to about the paper was Jay Graber, who is now Bluesky’s CEO. She had already been thinking deeply and researching similar ideas. Unlike most others I spoke to, she not only believed in the vision of a more decentralized internet, but saw a clear path to making it a reality.
Over the years since then, I watched as Jack Dorsey & Parag Agrawal at Twitter embraced the ideas of my paper and funded Jay to try to build a decentralized social protocol that actually worked and could achieve mainstream adoption. Importantly, Bluesky is not alone in trying to pursue this new reality for the internet, and I’ve chronicled many of the various developments being made by many others engaged in this world-improving project of decentralizing the internet. And while I support many of the attempts at building decentralized social media systems, Bluesky remains the most interesting experiment in the space.
Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality. And while I’ve offered informal support and advice in the past when asked, I’ve never had any formal or official connection with the company, until now. When the opportunity arose to join the board it seemed, after some thoughtful conversations with Jay and others on the board and at the company, to make sense to make that relationship more formal, allowing me to better help Bluesky make this vision a reality.
The challenges are already exciting. One of the key things that has fascinated me about Bluesky is that they have made it clear from the beginning that they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat — which is why building an open protocol is so important. In my view, one of my roles as a board member is to ensure the company stays true to that more open vision, and resists the pressures that could lead it down the more enclosed, centralized path that has captured so many of its predecessors.
One other aspect that has kept me interested in Bluesky is how the team there understands that most users not only don’t care about that decentralized vision, and shouldn’t have to care about that vision. Those users just want a service that works well, and works for them. Many other decentralized social media networks have focused on different approaches to building their communities, which is great. Experimentation and differentiation is how we will figure out what works for which communities. But I particularly appreciate the emphasis that Bluesky places on building a system that works for a wide spectrum of users.
And, while there have been hiccups along the way (and more will come), the company has consistently built thoughtfully with users in mind, while still staying true to the underlying vision. As a result it’s built unique and exciting features like algorithmic choice, an open source labeling system, and “hidden” federation — most users have no idea the system is federated, and that’s the way it should be. You should be able to build a decentralized, open, protocol-based social network without most users knowing or even caring about it. You should be able to build a system just as usable and feature-filled as traditional, centralized social media systems, while still creating underlying technology and infrastructure that prevents it from exploiting users like those centralized platforms do.
It is, of course, exciting to see thoughts I’ve expressed for how to fix the Internet actually start to become tangible reality, which is why I’m excited to be involved with Bluesky to help it continue to move forward.
But I am still a writer, with many more thoughts to continue to express. Including here at Techdirt, which won’t change. We’ll still be writing about the Internet as it is, and as it should be, as well as the legal, technological, and sociological forces that keep shaping it, just as we have for more than a quarter of a century.
This is somewhat new territory for me. While I am on my own company’s board, as well as the boards of two non-profits, this is the first outside corporate board position I’ll be taking. So because I am now wearing that second hat I will endeavor to be as transparent as possible when wearing this other hat. I don’t foresee it being an issue in most cases, including when writing about any of the larger, centralized commercial platforms — the editorial independence that has always left us willing to call things as we see them, to either praise or criticize, as warranted, isn’t going anywhere. I still want a better internet for users, and getting there still requires being able to speak the truth about where we are right now. But for stories involving Bluesky, decentralization, or other competing decentralized platforms I promise to be as transparent as possible, and if necessary hand off stories to others (and even remove myself from the editing process) when my two hats may be in conflict.
But I don’t plan to shy away from those stories altogether. Over the years we’ve tried to chronicle here at Techdirt as much as we can about the internet we have, because that record is itself important to be able to reflect on, especially if better choices for the future are to be made. And I still have that job to do.
As many of you know, I’ve been pretty excited about where Bluesky is going as a social media offering, not just because of the people who have been using it (who have mostly been great, making it a fun place to hang out these days), but because of the concepts behind it.
Bluesky was originally seeded by Jack Dorsey in response to his reading my Protocols, Not Platforms paper. The project moved along (somewhat slowly) for a few years. While Dorsey funded it, and the idea was that Twitter would eventually adopt the protocol, it was created as a wholly independent company, which initially had a contract with Twitter. The whole concept was finally picking up steam, just as Elon bought Twitter and cancelled the company’s relationship with Bluesky.
From there, the company quickly pivoted to release a reference app of its own, to give people a sense of how you could build a social media network that wasn’t awful and wasn’t confusing. But, because of the rush to set up their own network, and the numerous features it didn’t yet have ready (e.g., in the early days there was no “block” feature at all), it was setup as a closed beta, where you needed an invite to use the system.
Even with that invite system, Bluesky grew to over 3.2 million users (not all of whom have stuck around, but the network keeps growing). Over the past year, Bluesky has built out a number of new features, both ones to reach parity with what’s expected of most social networks, as well as some unique (and important) ones.
For example, the company has added some (still early) features that give users much more control over their experience: composable moderation and algorithmic choice. Composable moderation lets users set some of their own preferences for what they want to encounter on social media, rather than leaving it entirely up to a central provider. Some people are more willing to see sexual content, for example.
But, the algorithmic choice is perhaps even more powerful. Currently, people talk a lot about “the algorithm” and now most social networks give you one single algorithm of what they think you’ll want to see. There is often a debate among people about “what’s better: a chronological feed or the algorithmically generated feed” from the company. But that’s always been thinking too small.
With Bluesky’s algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use. In my Bluesky, for example, I have a few different algorithms that I can choose to recommend interesting stuff to me. One of them, developed by an outside developer (i.e., not Bluesky), Skygaze, is a “For You” feed that… is actually good? Unlike centralized social media, Skygaze’s goal with its feed is not to improve engagement numbers for Bluesky.
I also have feeds showing me “quiet posters” (calling attention to posts from users who don’t post all that often) or posts that are “popular with friends.” I have a few different topic-focused algorithms as well, including one highlighting breaking stories from journalists, and others highlighting posts from folks interested in tech law and policy.
In other words, rather than letting Bluesky curate my experience (or leaving it up to the whims of a chronological feed), I get to curate the experience myself, with help for anyone else who is creating and releasing their own feed algorithms.
And all of that is about to get even better. Because Bluesky also announced that they’re opening up their moderation system as well, to enable a similar sort of feature for moderation:
In the coming weeks, we’re excited to release the labeling services which will allow users to stack more options on top of their existing moderation preferences. This will allow other organizations and people to run their own moderation services that can account for industry-specific knowledge or specific cultural norms, among other preferences.
One potential use case for labeling is fact-checking. For example, a fact-checking organization can run a labeling service and mark posts as “partially false,” “misleading,” or other categories. Then, users who trust this organization can subscribe to their labels. As the user scrolls through posts in the app, any labels that the fact-checking organization publishes will be visible on the post itself. This helps in the effective distribution of the fact-check and keeps users better informed.
I expect that we’ll begin to see a lot of innovation there as well.
In addition, the company has said that it is finally rolling out its long awaited federation features. While Bluesky and its underlying ATProtocol was always designed to be a federated network, to date, the only real way to use Bluesky was to rely on Bluesky’s servers. There are some amazing third party clients (Deck.blue is an astoundingly great Tweetdeck-like multi-column client), but they’re still just showing you what’s on Bluesky’s servers.
But that’s changing:
This month, we’ll be rolling out an experimental early version of “federation,” or the feature that makes the network so open and customizable. On Bluesky, you’ll have the freedom to choose (and the right to leave) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships can go with you.
I know that a lot of people hear “federation” and worry that it will be confusing and complex, as it often feels on something like Mastodon (though, Mastodon has put a lot of effort into making that experience better). But Bluesky is building from the ground up with a plan to make the federation aspect as seamless as possible.
All of this is pretty exciting. Yesterday, I spoke to Will Oremus at the Washington Post as he was working on an article about Bluesky opening up, and I said something to him (which didn’t make his article) but I think is important. I mentioned that I’ve always believed that there were two ways to make a “protocols” approach to social media work: (1) convince a big company to move away from a centralized system or (2) have someone use a protocol based system to build something that was just, fundamentally, at its core better.
Both approaches have challenges to succeed. But I think it’s fascinating that Bluesky started as (1), but has very much moved to (2) (and, of course, it’s notable that I never included “have a narcissist billionaire ruin one major platform that people kinda liked” as a third option for how this might work).
It’s still a long way to go to see if Bluesky succeeds, and there are oh so many ways it could go wrong. But the inclusion of composable moderation and algorithmic feeds already gives me a way better experience than any other social media platform, and it does so not in the service of any billionaire, but rather in service of me, the user. And that is incredibly encouraging as a start.
And, given the open nature of ATProtocol, it also means that if Bluesky fucks it up, and doesn’t actually continue to build in this direction, others have the ability to make it better for them (and for everyone).
To celebrate opening up, Bluesky teamed up with artist Davis BIckford to create a lovely comic explaining why Bluesky is different, and why it matters. You can see the whole thing in Bluesky’s post on opening up, but here’s just a snippet.
I know lots of people like to crap on social media. And I’ve heard a bunch of people insist that Bluesky is too late to the party, or that Threads will kill it or some-such. And, hey, that may be true. But right now, it’s a place that offers a fantastic user experience, which puts you in control more than any other. And, once federation opens up you don’t even have to worry about it being in service to a single company or a single billionaire.
