ongoing by Tim Bray · Protocol Churn
Bluesky and the Fediverse are our best online hopes for humane human conversation. Things happened on 2025/01/13; I’ll hand the microphone to Anil Dash, whose post starts “This is a monumental day for the future of the social web.”
What happened? Follow Anil’s links: Mastodon and Bluesky (under the “Free Our Feeds” banner). Not in his sound-bite: Both groups are seeking donations, raising funds to meet those goals.
I’m sympathetic to both these efforts, but not equally. I’m also cynical, mostly about the numbers: They’ve each announced a fundraising target, and both the targets are substantial, and I’m not going to share either, because they’re just numbers pulled out of the air, written on whiteboards, designed to sound impressive.
What is true · These initiatives, just by existing, are evidence in letters of fire 500 miles high, evidence of people noticing something important: Corporately-owned town squares are irreversibly discredited. They haven’t worked in the past, they don’t work now, and they’ll never work.
