This article is a must read.
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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.
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.
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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!
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.
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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.
So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.
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So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.
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.
