The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification
The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification
Disclosure: I’m on the 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…
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.
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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.
Bruh, ActivityPub is right there, and we already have places where people can communicate. And it's already built in such a way that anyone can make use of it. Currently not so with ATprotocol.
When BlueSky has interoperable servers that anyone can spin up, then this conversation is worth having, but if the protocol at all requires "the next person" to have tons of investment capital to get things running again, it's still just a billionaire-buyout away.
Preach.
To be fair ActivityPub is a pretty shitty protocol in terms of scaling up with all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires. Not that ATprotocol is better, just that there is room for improvement on ActivityPub before it could be used on a world-wide scale for the entire human population the way major social media sites are right now.
all the quadratic communication and caching growth it requires.
I have trouble visualizing and understanding how the Internet works at scale, but can generally grasp how page-by-page or resource-by-resource requests work. I struggle to understand how one could efficiently parse the firehose of activity coming from every user on every instance that your own users follow, at least in user-focused services like Mastodon (or Twitter or Bluesky). With Lemmy, there will be many more people following the biggest communities with the most activity, so caching naturally scales. But with Twitter-like follows of individual accounts, there are going to be a lot of accounts on the long tail, with lots of different accounts being followed only by a few people. The most efficient method is to just ignore the small accounts, but obviously that ends up affecting a large number of accounts. But on the other hand, keeping up with the many small accounts will end up occupying all the resources on stuff very few people want to see.
A centralized service has to struggle with this as well, but might have better control over caching and other on-demand retrieval of content in lower demand, without inadvertently DDoSing someone else's server.
You're not wrong, and if BlueSky is so allegedly "philanthropic" (according to them), it's not like they couldn't have put their efforts towards improving ActivityPub instead, which is already resisting centralization from the likes of Meta.
And if they weren't allowed to do so, due to some rule governing investment capital or shareholders, etc., therein lies their problem.
And unfortunately bluesky isn't as decentralized as they may appear