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 ex

ongoing by Tim Bray · Why Not Bluesky

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2024-11-18 02:00:15

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.

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.

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