The first is to keep building on ActivityPub. I love our protocol and our ecosystem, and I think it's a wonderful network. But it's also a necessary hedge against clawback or collapse.

So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.

Actually think the most likely scenario is that they continue to operate at a loss and are funded by crypto VC interests, or outright billionaire oligarchs, with the purpose of coralling liberal voices and managing their reach through increasingly restrictive algorithmic manipulations.

The biggest danger for the whole open social web is that we put all of our eggs in the Bluesky basket. And if they claw back or collapse, we might not have enough happening outside the blast zone to recover.

Running out of money just happens. I think the kind of management decisions that let you make money without cannibalizing the ecosystem are hard to do. I wish the Bluesky team luck in it.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

If they stay open and of goodwill indefinitely, awesome. Great for everyone.

I see three outcomes for Bluesky:

1. They keep working on opening up the ATmosphere.
2. They try to claw back value from the developer ecosystem (FB and Twitter did this in early 2010s).
3. They run out of money and shut down.

Here, "they" means the current corporate entity or an acquirer. If there's another outcome I'm missing, lmk!

Sears showed up on day and said they were renegotiating the deal and were only going to pay 75% of the price per mower. The company had no choice, but to accept even though they were now losing money on each unit sold. Then suddenly Sears began offering their own mower, and stopped buying any at all and the company, full of debt, was ruined.

Same as it ever was...

Dad used to tell a story about a lawn mower manufacturer back in the early 1900s. They made a great lawn mower, and sold 1000 of them per year. They we're approached by Sears Roebuck and got an order for another 1000 doubling their business. Then Sears wanted 5000. They borrowed heavily and expanded to fulfill the order. Then 10,000. Then 50,000. You see where this is going.

-more-

yes but the developers trying to build VC futures on AT don't understand the beauty of decentralization.

whatever you come up with, you're not going to be crazy rich. your service or app will be one of many implementations that do very similar things and where people can switch easily. hopefully many people will pay you a reasonable amount to keep it great but it's going to be a lifestyle business, not a sellout and retire or start again type thing.

I (perhaps inaccurately) feel like as of the 2010s, if you were nimble enough to outcompete an entrenched incumbent, the playbook would be to acquire your company.

This is #techshit, spreading a miasma over the #openweb. And when it inevitably fails, the rotting stink will linger, making it even harder for people to take the step they need to take.

Not to say that #ActivityPub doesn't have some pretty big problems, it does. Ones that #Bluesky does a much better job with. But with ActivityPub? It's not designed or built around a private platform first. It was built to be an open ecosystem from its inception.

Bluesky was built to be open as a side quest, not a driving mission.

The same considerations should be honestly made for the #ActivityPub fediverse as well. So we may address them in time. Not all is well. I am writing a blog post on open standards divergence and increasing unattractiveness of an ecosystem that hems itself into a straitjacket of narrow application areas, by the protocol decay we allow to fester. Combined with inadequate work methods to reconcile the tech debt that this incurs. We must go "back to standards" or have an ecosystem based on enabling technologies that are increasingly unattractive to adopt.