https://atproto.com/guides/faq
2. Jack Dorsey is on the board but has no day-to-day role in the company. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and is in control. The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
3. Bluesky has a different approach in many ways. One of the biggest differences is that Bluesky is (IMHO) the first decentralized social network that is highly usable by regular non-technical users.
I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience.
However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues.
That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads.
There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale.
Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing.
I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.
You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers.
> Server shutdowns are rare
Not rare enough though.
To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.
I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the servers running the federation from the domains holding the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each user that wants to have their own domain.
There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping users from recovering their identity.
> The protocol is also designed not to require trust. The network is being "locked open" in a way that would allow it to survive Bluesky becoming evil.
I feel like we have seen this movie play out a few times. There are always way to close things down the road. For example, I can imagine that even with federation there will be a power law of distribution, and there's a high chance that most users will end up on official Bluesky servers. This means that you could one they stop federating, and most users would be backed in a walled garden. Sure, the protocol would be out there in the open, but it wouldn't matter because overnight it would lose most of its users.
I trust that you and the initial team has genuine motivation not to do this. Forgive me for being cynical, but history does reapeat itself.
I think the only antidote against this is regulation, as we're seing now with the DMA in EU that forces WhatsApp and other gate keepers to open their platform to other clients.
Users should think of this in terms of buy in cost. If you use a particular platform for 10 years, and build a community on it, you can take advantage of that and you get a mostly free service. But at some point the bill comes, and you move on. However, I keep thinking that the reason why some of those open third party protocols - even including email - "suck" is because so much of the time and focus has been on these proprietary, commercial communications platforms.
I feel so old now I went from thinking email is a terrible way of communicating to, actually Facebook is far worse. Instead of seeing updates from my friends I'm looking at a firehose of noise of things I can't control and have zero interest in. Nearly 20 years later, I use e-mail every day and Facebook 0.
Veering off-topic, but seeing conversations running for many years over the standards implementation and feature parity of the clients and servers both for XMPP and Matrix (meaning each separately, not inter-operating XMPP and Matrix, but rather each protocol has many servers and many clients, all trying to keep up with a moving protocol spec without breaking backwards compatibility), I have to laugh that a piece of legislation can just magically open the doors a some potentially very convoluted and continuously changing communications platform to third parties.
It could be even more self defeating and monopoly re-enforcing if those platforms are relaying to users of third party apps the features they are missing along with warnings about non-existent encryption and everyone can read their messages.
If nothing else, Bitcoin is a successful existence proof. Maintaining control may be easier, but it's safe to say that Satoshi wouldn't be able to take control back now.
