"What's Bluesky?" asked my mother this morning. I really didn't know how to explain it to her. "It's kinda like Threads and Twitter, but it hasn't really pissed people off yet" I replied. She responded with "Why are people mad at Meta?" to which I could only reply "When aren't people mad at Meta?"

Look.

I can understand getting mad at companies, but it gets to a point where you're never going to be able to use the web again, people. I'm not advocating for complacency, far from it, I'm advocating for a little bit more complex of a thought process than "thing bad, other thing good" since that's a lot of what I'm seeing.

ActivityPub vs ATProto

This is hardly a battle when it comes to standards. ActivityPub is a recognized standard from the W3C and has an insane amount of grassroots support from people. ATProto is built by a VC-backed company. That's all I have to say about that.

We Need Second Order Thinking

If the only thought process is "this company did something bad, I need to move to a different company" then we're going to be doing this for a while. It's time to understand that companies aren't going to save you. Stop acting like they are. Everyone is getting off Threads because they don't like Meta's policies, and they're going to leave Bluesky when they have to get their VCs some sort of exit strategy.

The point of Bluesky is to make money, it will never be more than a profit venture. They are going to have to grow and monetize infinitely, it's inherent in their funding structure. You can ignore that all you want (much like how you all ignored that you were fleeing from Elon to Zuck), but you're just going to get mad again.

Why I Choose the Fediverse

I chose the fediverse because it's made by people. I'm sitting here having conversations with Dan Supernault, the creator of many fediverse applications, namely Pixelfed and Loops, platforms for photo and shortform video sharing respectively. It's one guy. Doing it for fun. He's funded by grants, he's not beholden to investors the same way that Bluesky is.

The Fediverse is filled with ventures like this, it's not propped up by the promise of future profits, it's held up by the care and attention of millions of individuals.

The People Problem

Sure, it's a lot harder to meet people on the fediverse, you're not going to get as much engagement as you would on other platforms. But that's fine. What do you gain from building such a large following on a platform only to throw it all away and start over the second you realize the company was just out for profits (which, again, shouldn't be a surprise, that's how companies work).

Inevitably we're going to find ourselves here again. Threads said they were going to federate and they've done a sorry job of it. Bluesky is supposed to be decentralized, but I'm still not entirely sure exactly how that claim actually holds up. It's just one platform, it's just Bluesky. The second they try and make money at your expense, it's gone.

Closing Thoughts

So I'm going to be on Bluesky, I have been for a while, but the fediverse is where I'm going to be dedicating the most of my time. I'm not interested in constantly having to move around because other people are mad at their own choices. We all know it's just a matter of time until we're having this conversation about being screwed by Bluesky and everyone's following is gone yet again. But I'll be over here, I can bring my following anywhere within this network. This network is more than Mastodon, it's more than Threads, and it's bigger than just one CEO or one company. Others simply aren't. I'll be over on Mastodon or I guess on Bluesky.