Delusions of a Protocol
So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.
Jesse Singal's malfeasance is widely documented elsewhere. What has Bluesky's userbase up in arms is, mainly, three things:
- Bluesky's lackadaisical and inconsistent moderation letting Jesse Singal keep his account on the service even after he committed serious abuses on the platform;
- Bluesky's lackadaisical and inconsistent moderation banning and suspending accounts for nonsense reasons, probably most notably comics writer Gretchen Falker-Martin who reportedly was sanctioned for reacting with a 'lol' at news of Charlie Kirk being shot;
- Bluesky's lackadaisical and inconsistent moderation team updating the site's terms of service with new rules about porn that, although they are written vaguely and badly, seem to basically restrict users from posting non-con/dub-con erotica or even discussing the subject of rape in a non-eroticized way.
For the record: I think Jay Graber is a transphobe; I think there's just too much evidence in her behavior to not read that into her actions at this point. No normal person would go out of their way to court Jesse Singal. A lot of this stuff feels motivated by a glaring animus towards the userbase that Bluesky has attracted; and because this userbase formed around people who simply couldn't justify being on Twitter any more, said userbase is full of highly visible trans users.
But, we can also view it as just run of the mill stuff for any kind of corporate social media platform; you expect them to be unaccountable, to have vague policies that are enforced with no consistency, and so on. What distinguishes the Bluesky case, though, is that Bluesky has a very particular ideology that Graber and her cohorts push, which is that they are 'stewards of the AT Protocol'. She has repeatedly made this point: you can take your ball and go home.
Graber posts something like this basically every other day. So, let's examine her claim a little bit.
When people say 'decentralized social media', most people think of Mastodon, or more properly the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon implements. But AT Proto is not really decentralized in the same way as ActivityPub. People don't necessarily realize this because if you try to explain to someone how AT Proto works, they immediately go to sleep, but let's try anyway.
With Mastodon, the effective unit of decentralization is the instance. Each instance is like a little social network unto itself, but instances can talk to each other, sharing updates and allowing users to follow one another and communicate cross-instance. I won't get into the merits of this system or whether it works out as a matter of social practice, but it's reasonably easy to understand in theory.
AT Proto doesn't work like that. AT Proto is a bunch of distinct services, each of which can be lumped or split in different ways. Here, have a diagram that'll put hair on your chest:
The basic building blocks that make up bluesky are:
- The PDS, or personal data server. This hosts your actual user data. The vast majority of Bluesky users host their data on Bluesky's own PDS, but theoretically you can use an alternative or self-host, if you want.
- The relay, which aggregates all the updates from everyone's individual PDSs (which mostly, to within a rounding error, just means the single Bluesky PDS service) and turns it into a single data stream that every other service on the network consumes. The relay is a centralizing single point of failure, and it's also a completely thankless job to run one; they are pure infrastructure with (theoretically) no influence on what users see or do on the network.
- This single data stream is known as the 'firehose', which as the name implies is basically one big feed of literally every action on the network aggregated together. The Bluesky app itself on your phone or on the web consumes this 'firehose' and filters out the posts from people you follow to create your feed. 'Labelers' consume this feed to label posts to provide moderation or informational labels on content. 'Feed generators'... generate feeds; that's where you get the discover feed or the dozens of specialty feeds on bluesky.
Here's the fundamental thing, however: at present there's no real production alternative to the Bluesky relay, the Bluesky firehose, or the Bluesky app view. And the Bluesky app view is tied directly to the Bluesky moderation services.
To my knowledge there's only one alternate stack that runs atproto as a complete service, Blacksky. But this isn't a turnkey solution that you can stand up as your own independent alternative; Blacksky at present barely has documentation. And even Blacksky users are still more or less under the thumb of Bluesky's moderation service, if they intend to reach 99% of the network as it exists today.
ATProto's complicated architecture more or less puts running an alternative app into the realm of well-funded nonprofits and startups, as opposed to Mastodon instances which can easily be run by hobbyists on their own domestic hardware.
With Mastodon, spinning up a new instance is as easy as starting a Docker container. With Bluesky, 'taking your ball and going home' is a six to seven figure software development project. AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years.
Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. With Mastodon, the phone and web apps are just thin frontends that connect to any instance; I use Phanpy.social to connect to my own self-hosted GoToSocial instance, for example. With Bluesky, the Bluesky app you can get on the iOS app store or connect to via bsky.app is indelibly bound to the app view service run by Bluesky inc.
There can be generic clients that can connect to different app services... but Bluesky inc isn't making those. Bluesky inc is making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.
I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform.
This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.
As it stands, on Bluesky, alternate moderation services can only ever be additive, overlays on top of the default moderation. Which is to say, you can never see posts that Bluesky doesn't want you to see, but you're free to ban more posts or users beyond what Bluesky will ban. This system means that Bluesky inc retains the power to use their effective monopoly to suppress speech Graber finds distasteful or ban porn that the moderators think is gross.
But at the same time they can hide behind these third-party 'labelers' as an excuse when called out on their neglect in dealing with figures like Singal, a serial harasser and all-around scumbag. The practical upshot of this of course is the same as it ever was when Twitter refused to ban nazis and harassers off their platform: a mess of individuals curating their own shared blocklists leading to widespread friendly fire and false positives.
Which is to say: a long-ass walk to create Twitter 2 while having a narrative about why you didn't just create Twitter 2, which nobody outside the building believes in.