Oohkay… a (not so) quick rant and announcement. Since the death of corporate social media is taking longer than expected and the ActivityPub-powered fediverse (Mastodon, Akkoma, etc…) seems to feel too complicated (it isn’t!) too anti-viral (that’s a good thing) for many people and whatever other excuse you folks have for not showing up there, i’m reluctantly dipping my toes into Bluesky, although i have many reservations regarding that company so here’s a quick breakdown of these:
- It started as a former twitter project and we all know how much that already went to shit even before that clown took over.
- It’s a for-profit company.
- It’s funded, among others, by some crypto bros who are sure to seek return on their investment at some point, so the next platform enshittification cycle’s gonna begin.
- The company doesn’t have any concrete plan about how they’re gonna finance the project in the long term, which will also affect how they’re gonna treat their users in the future. In that regard, i have a deep distrust of the tech bro sphere. Remenber when Facebook was new and positioned itself as a more privacy-respecting, non-abusing, ad-free alternative to MySpace? Yeah, we all know how marvellous that went.
- Although Bluesky (on paper, at least) aims to be a decentral network which in turn would give users a way out if they get too annoyed with the company (just switch instances, then), there’s yet no meaningful amount of real decentralization happening, where you’d be able to easily spin up your own instance. So for now, it’s still all in the hands of a single company.
- Bluesky chose to design their own protocol instead of contributing to, building on and improving upon the pre-existing ActivityPub standard which powers Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse, thus denying their users the interoperability to access said fediverse, once again leading to fragmentation of the online communities.
- More of a personal opinion. To me, the culture and atmosphere on bluesky feels a lot like the super-viral, hyper-active twitter of old which is probably the reason ex-twitter folks like it but, to be perfectly honest, i never liked very much personally and have zero nostalgia for. I very much prefer the less hyped-up, more personally driven conversation on the ActivityPub-fediverse.
So, despite all that, long story short, i have a bluesky handle now: @12xublog.bsky.social.
For now, i’m just gonna crosspost from my akkoma instance, which i still consider my primary homebase on the social web. But if you wanna follow 12XU via Bluesky, now you can. That’s all.
