Jay and Bluesky's team has fallen into a trap from which there is no escape. They need funding from VCs and they won't get it if they go against the community, because that would mean less growth. I wouldn't want to be in their place.
Discussion
Was this not the observation Dorsey made that brought him to remove his bluesky account?
Yeah, Dorsey was right. However, I'm glad I learned this the hard way. Trusting famous people with tens of thousands of followers is always a gamble.
albeit that things can be reasoned through in advance, or reasoning by others can be assessed, instead of just ''trusting''; fair enough, such hard ways make for the best foundations anyway :)
A big part of these types of outcomes is also based on the community that forms around them. Bluesky ended up, for various reasons largely unrelated to its underlying protocol, being adopted by a very specific community, and that community views policing untoward speech as a core part of how social media should operate (not passing judgement on that here!). While the protocol design attempted to do that at a higher layer, the community’s strong stance on moderation and the developer’s need to fight urgent spam and moderation fires meant that protocol neutrality took a back seat. Once it was there, with a rapidly-growing community that viewed this as good, it wasn’t coming back.
Sure, but to borrow some ideas from #urbanism, I do think that "infrastructure determines culture" to a certain extent here.... The major barriers of entry for anyone like Blacksky to spin up alternative systems creates a situation where the "exit / voice" dynamic is heavily skewed towards "voice", and users feel their only option is to fight battles rather than do their own thing.
The design of Bluesky was intended to allow for tribal portability such that a PSS banning you didn’t really matter, you’d just move your data and use a new one. AFAIU (and I don’t follow it closely really) that isn’t quite what has happened.