As a dangerous and evil man drives people away from Xitter, many stories are talking up Bluesky as the destination for the diaspora. This piece explains why I kind of like Bluesky but, for the moment, have no intention of moving my online social life away from the Fediverse.

(By “Fediverse” I mean the social network built around the ActivityPub protocol, which for most people means Mastodon.)

If we’re gonna judge social-network alternatives, here are three criteria that, for me, really matter: Technology, culture, and money.

I don’t think that’s controversial. But this is: Those are in increasing order of importance. At this point in time, I don’t think the technology matters at all, and money matters more than all the others put together. Here’s why.

Technology · Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse rely on ActivityPub implementations. Bluesky relies on the AT Protocol, of which so far there’s only one serious implementation.

Both of these protocols are good enough. We know this is true because both are actually working at scale, providing good and reliable experiences to large numbers of people. It’s reasonable to worry what happens when you get to billions of users and also about which is more expensive to operate. But speaking as someone who spent decades in software and saw it from the inside at Google and AWS, I say: meh. My profession knows how to make this shit work and work at scale. Neither alternative is going to fail, or to trounce its competition, because of technology.

I could write many paragraphs about the competing nice features and problems of the competing platforms, and many people have. But it doesn’t matter that much because they’re both OK.

Culture · At the moment, Bluesky seems, generally speaking, to be more fun. The Fediverse is kind of lefty and geeky and queer. The unfortunate Mastodon culture of two years ago (“Ewww, you want us to have better tools and be more popular? Go away!”) seems to have mostly faded out. But the Fediverse doesn’t have much in the way of celebrities shitposting about the meme-du-jour. In fact it’s definitely celebrity-lite.

I enjoy both cultural flavors, but find Fedi quite a lot more conversational. There are others who find the opposite.

More important, I don’t think either culture is set in stone, or has lost the potential to grow in multiple new, interesting directions.

Money · Here’s the thing. Whatever you think of capitalism, the evidence is overwhelming: Social networks with a single proprietor have trouble with long-term survival, and those do survive have trouble with user-experience quality: see Enshittification.

The evidence is also perfectly clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. The original social network, email, is now into its sixth decade of vigorous life. It ain’t perfect but it is essential, and not in any serious danger.

The single crucial difference between email and all those other networks — maybe the only significant difference — is that nobody owns or controls it. If you have a deployment that can speak the languages of IMAP and SMTP and the many anti-spam tools, you are de facto part of the global email social network.

The definitive essay on this question is Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. (Mike is now on Bluesky’s Board of Directors.)

What does success look like? · My bet for the future (and I think it’s the only one with a chance) is a global protocol-based conversation with many thousands of individual service providers, many of which aren’t profit-oriented businesses. One of them could be your local Buddhist temple, and another could be Facebook. The possibilities are endless: Universities, government departments, political parties, advocacy organizations, sports teams, and, yes, tech companies.

It’s obvious to me that the Fediverse has the potential to become just this. Because it’s most of the way there already.

Could Bluesky? Well, maybe. As far as I can tell, the underlying AT Protocol is non-proprietary and free for anyone to build on. Which means that it’s not impossible. But at the moment, the service and the app are developed and operated by “Bluesky Social, PBC”. In practice, if that company fails, the app and the network go away. Here’s a bit of Bluesky dialogue:

In practice, “Bsky corp” is not in immediate danger of hard times. Their team is much larger than Mastodon’s and on October 24th they announced they’d received $15M in funding, which should buy them at least a year.

But that isn’t entirely good news. The firm that led the investment is seriously sketchy, with strong MAGA and cryptocurrency connections.

The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make money for the “Limited Partners” who provide the capital. Since VC investments are high-risk, most are expected to fail, and the ones that succeed have to exhibit exceptional revenue growth and profitability. Which is a direct path to the problems of survival and product quality that I mentioned above.

Having said that, the investment announcement is full of soothing words about focus on serving the user and denials that they’ll go down the corrupt and broken crypto road. I would like to believe that, but it’s really difficult.

To be clear, I’m a fan of the Bluesky leadership and engineering team. With the VC money as fuel, I expect their next 12 months or so to be golden, with lots of groovy features and mind-blowing growth. But that’s not what I’ll be watching.

I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator.

Just like Mastodon and the Fediverse already are.

Yes, in comparison to Bluesky, Mastodon has a smaller development team and slower growth and fewer celebrities and less buzz. It’s supported by Patreon donations and volunteer labor. And in the case of my own registered co-operative instance CoSocial.ca, membership dues of $50/year.

Think of the Fediverse not as just one organism, but a population of mammals, scurrying around the ankles of the bigger and richer alternatives. And when those alternatives enshittify or fall to earth, the Fediversians will still be there. That’s why it’s where my social-media energy is still going.

Read more · On the Fediverse you can follow a hashtag and I’m subscribed to #Bluesky, which means a whole lot of smart, passionate writing on the subject has been coming across my radar. If you’re interested enough to have read to the bottom of this piece, I bet one or more of these will reward an investment of your time:

• Maybe Bluesky has “won”, by Gavin Anderegg, goes deep on the trade-offs around Bluesky’s AT Protocol and shares my concern about money.

• Blue Sky Mine, by Rob Horning, ignores technology and wonders about the future of text-centric social media and is optimistic about Bluesky.

• Does Bluesky have the juice?, by Max Read, is kind of cynical but says smart things about the wave of people currently landing on Bluesky.

• The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet, by Jason Koebler over at 404 Media, is super-optimistic: “Bluesky feels more vibrant and more filled with real humans than any other social media network on the internet has felt in a very long time.” He also wonders out loud if Threads’ flirtation with Mastodon has been damaging. Hmm.

• And finally there’s Cory Doctorow, probably the leading thinker about the existential conflict between capitalism and life online, with Bluesky and enshittification. This is the one to read if you’re thinking that I’m overthinking and over-worrying about a product that is actually pretty nice and currently doing pretty well. If you don’t know what a “Ulysses Pact” is, you should read up and learn about it. Strong stuff.