| Bluesky is the first time users have control over their social networking, and that's exciting & so so different. There's 3rd party feeds, algorithms, moderation, & labels that are all open ended tools we've only just begun to put into people's hands to try out. The data architecture starts eith a personal cryptographic data store. Which can have endless different types of data in it. So for example you can have SmokeSignals Events in your feed or FrontPage reddit like in your feed. https://bsky.app/profile/smokesignal.events And it's all open data. So we can analyze thr network & try to spot & root out large influence campaigns, find patterns of behavior that bad actors and sometimes state sponsored actors are pushing on the network. There's so many open possibilities here. I can get how on the surface this looks "the same old with a fresh paint of cost," but the techies are moving here en masse because we believe this is so much more fertile a ground with so much more potential & possibility, we believe it will be a place we can put in energy & ongoingly iterate & improve social networking. And the team has very explicitly designed the system to assume that someday BlueSky may become the problem. It's not fully tested at scale but we have the technical ability to walk away, & keep the social network going, if the BlueSky corporation ever loses our trust. It's sad that there's such a fatalistic nihilistic air about, that judgements are so quick to be called. It's still early days for the AtProtocol/BlueSky, but we already see the protocols not platforms decisions here enabling experiences so far beyond what BlueSky corporation alone could ever hope to provide, and that ever-richening interconnection & potentiation is incredibly alluring & a chance unlike any we've seen in a generation. |