Empowering Users Through Decentralization Standards

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The cooperation and competition between Blue Sky's product and At Protocol have shaped the company's dynamic and product development processes, enabling users to choose their own moderation filters and recommendation algorithms. This decentralization approach allows for composable moderation. Blue Sky's growth to over 5 million users reflects early decisions on product design and moderation, influencing the platform's culture. Despite facing content moderation challenges, the company focuses on devolving control to users. Additionally, the discussion delves into the standards battle between At Protocol and other decentralization standards like Activity Pub, highlighting the benefits of Blue Sky's approach and envisioning their future coexistence.

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.

Links:

Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform — The Verge
Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it — The Verge
The fediverse, explained — The Verge
Bluesky showed everyone’s ass — The Verge
Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
The ‘queer.af’ Mastodon instance disappeared because of the Taliban — The Verge
Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests — Forbes
Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk — TechCrunch
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media — TechCrunch
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech — Mike Masnick