thank you for sharing the article.

The same considerations should be honestly made for the #ActivityPub fediverse as well. So we may address them in time. Not all is well. I am writing a blog post on open standards divergence and increasing unattractiveness of an ecosystem that hems itself into a straitjacket of narrow application areas, by the protocol decay we allow to fester. Combined with inadequate work methods to reconcile the tech debt that this incurs. We must go "back to standards" or have an ecosystem based on enabling technologies that are increasingly unattractive to adopt.

This is why I'll _almost_ never understand the excitement around the #ATmosphere . It's designed with FOSS aesthetics and private interest profiteering in mind.

Not to say that #ActivityPub doesn't have some pretty big problems, it does. Ones that #Bluesky does a much better job with. But with ActivityPub? It's not designed or built around a private platform first. It was built to be an open ecosystem from its inception.

Bluesky was built to be open as a side quest, not a driving mission.

Sadly, it isn’t - and it’s painfully visible. @evan called this right from the start, and he was right on this.

This is #techshit, spreading a miasma over the #openweb. And when it inevitably fails, the rotting stink will linger, making it even harder for people to take the step they need to take.

I agree with the argument but it's deeper. the developers trying to build VC futures on AT don't understand the beauty of decentralization.

whatever you come up with, you're not going to be crazy rich. your service or app will be one of many implementations that do very similar things and where people can switch easily. hopefully many people will pay you a reasonable amount to keep it great but it's going to be a lifestyle business, not a sellout and retire or start again type thing.

I had heard about Attie but I didn't know what it does. It sounds a lot like Bonsai, the project from Princeton:

arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10776

After reading, it leaves me with concerns that are not dev related.

1. If there's xlarge $ infusions involved, it means profit will always be 1st, and fuck the tech. They will never care.

2. If they'll eat their young once - and don't wince about it - they WILL do it again and enjoy it more aggressively every time.

3. Once they have a taste of their own, they'll feed on other's 'outside the family'.

They want performing monkeys, not projects with merit.

@ricci @hamishcampbell well, they had $100M when they raised money last year.

Crypto funds love to rollover crypto assets. So maybe some of it was in crypto, like Bitcoin, which has since dropped 25% against USD.

And they've been operating a tech startup with 20-30 staff and dozens of contractors, plus hosting costs which are somewhere in the $20-50M/year range, I'd bet.

If I had to guess on runway for BlueSky today, I'd say 12-24 months.

@hamishcampbell
I see three outcomes for Bluesky:

1. They keep working on opening up the ATmosphere.
2. They try to claw back value from the developer ecosystem (FB and Twitter did this in early 2010s).
3. They run out of money and shut down.

Here, "they" means the current corporate entity or an acquirer. If there's another outcome I'm missing, lmk!

@hamishcampbell
The second is to encourage all the work making ATproto and the ATmosphere open and independent. Taking the stack to the IETF is great. So is the independent DID corporation. And the patent statement helped a lot. The existence of independent (afaik) *Sky projects like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky and Gander are good too.

We can help keep up that momentum with some bridge-building and encouragement from the outside.

The clawback scenario usually happens when there's a change of management. I think it's great that when that happened, Toni Schneider took up the CEO job. He's got a good background in Open Source and standards from Automattic.

The big clawback of the early 2010s came when FB and Twitter rolled out advertising as a business model. They needed more control of end user experience to make that viable. So, a big thing to watch for with Bluesky.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

I don't think that would be accurate at all, in terms of what I presume most might think.

Assuming my memories haven't failed me yet, @Gargron saw a need for a community solution, and decided to tackle it as people-centric, rather than seeking a profit generator social replacement to fill his bank account.

Other's have sought the opposite, and as time goes on, the altruistic mask has fallen away, and they can't escape the obvious.

Never think it doesn't need some sunlight. :)

in my experience, the main determinant for any technology’s long-term development is how control over it is structured. It’s all a question of power.

Technologies where power is centralized often grow quickly. Some achieve monopoly status, most others die.

Technologies where power is distributed often grow much more slowly. But they’re exceedingly resilient. Over time, many become part of the fabric of society.

@lumiworx

@slothrop @Gargron

I remember a phrase that was drilled into me during college that fits in an oblique way here...

"You can have good, or you can have fast, but you'll never get both."

Excellent way to put it for sure.

Centralization is easy. You control it all. It's not good for people that want innovation and choice.

Decentralization brings freedom, innovation, choice, but offers a lot of technical roadblocks.

I just want choice. I can choose what's best for my family. I don't need Tim Apple, or whoever to tell me what's good for us, while trapping us into a fish bowl and making us work for our food.

I am also, but maybe in a different way.

As someone who helped create ActivityPub and works every day to promote its use, I absolutely believe that everyone should make and use ActivityPub-native software. At SWF, we only do ActivityPub projects.

But if a developer chooses to build on ATProto, and to make their software and accounts bridgeable so we can stay connected, that's infinitely better than being cut off entirely.

@lumiworx @Gargron at the individual and business level, there absolutely are strong upsides to rapid growth.

But as a user of technology, I find that systems with distributed power structures are a much better place to invest my time, energy and money.

@Gargron @lumiworx

I think it would be really great to work with companies like Graze to get their software to support ActivityPub also. That could be through the bridge or through the ActivityPub API or the Mastodon API. For them, it's hedging their bets, and for us, it's more developers in our ecosystem providing more functionality.

@Gargron @lumiworx

I mentioned elsewhere that I think supporting the openness of the Atmosphere is important for whatever comes next there. Whether BlueSky thrive or don't survive, the more the ATproto stack is standardized and independent, the better it is for the Fediverse.

@lumiworx @Gargron this is literally how it works in Silicon Valley. Amazon, Apple, Google have all done this via feature cloning, acquisition to kill a project. You name it, they've done it.

VC funded BlueSky would not be doing their jobs to increase shareholder value if they did not do all of the above and more. They have to, someone at the VCs funding this will instruct them to do so if it meant getting an ROI sooner.

Anyone who thinks they won't is being naive. I've seen it myself.

@occult @Gargron
Exactly. I'm certainly not against new protocols, and would much prefer them to be open and standardized.

My issue(s) are absolutely with puppetmastering devs, and using bait-and-switch logic to 'grow' a project that was designed at the outset to run counter to the 'solution' it was meant to solve. Lull a few hundred hopefuls into coding this sticky social concept into something glorious, only to walk away with the fruits of someone elses work, without remorse.

@Gargron @lumiworx

Company with +$100m in VC says one thing but does another. They're just doing the Apple "Sherlock" / Amazon "undercut and put the competition out of business" playbook.

Who's going to stop them?

I always hear about how BlueSky isn't the ATMosphere yet, time and again I see this bad behavior. They will dictate the path forward with their deep pockets.

They are incentivized to clone the good community ideas to increase their own value to pay back those VCs.

but that is just it, why? What is their goal? I see folks talking about how hard it is to get "exposure" on Mastodon, but I ask, do we really care about that? I do not.

Everyone is using these networks for different reasons. I (thankfully) do not have to care about an audience.

Everyone saw how Instagram ended up with clout-chasing influencers, and BlueSky may be heading in that same direction of placating the audience above all else.

@hamishcampbell

no the instincts are spot on

It’s not about features. It’s about culture.

#ActivityPub comes out of the #openweb tradition.

#Bluesky comes out of a split lineage - #openweb roots, shaped by #dotcons incentives, with an #encryptionist upbringing.

yeah, i think they are pretty clueless and mostly "fashion victims".
Imho there is big tech and it sucks, so some ppl build alternatives and talk about it, which activates many to switch.

But big Tech and their VCs dont want to lose users, so they build their own deranged version and copy the revoputionary narrative and pour money into marketing to catch everyone who was activated, but cant differentiate between real and fake apternatives and thus get trapped by big tech again imho🤷‍♀️

If I got it correct, #eurosky is still just a pds, relying an all the rest of the bluesky infrastructure.
But I think it's a matter of time before they do the whole stack.
They should do.

#blacksky did the whole stack, if bluesky has a downtime today, blacksky users would still be able to talk to each other (and with no-one else because AFAIK it's just those two).

Totally agree with Evan about keeping bridges open , so they can hear the crowd noises of the fediverse party just across the river 🙂

@evan @hamishcampbell @Sascha