Bluesky's Enshittification Risk
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.
Doctorow is more uncompromising (perhaps more virtuous) than I am. I’m not myself off of enshittified or en-route-to-being-enshittified platforms. I’ve already established a presence on Bluesky by mirroring my Mastodon presence. I’m even considering creating a more active presence there as it grows more popular. But he does a great job capturing my misgivings about the platform – better than I did in my previous post about it.
Bluesky has great aspirations to never become an enshittified platform and I admire much of what it’s done so far. I’m starting to see people building cool and experimental things with the APIs it provides! It reminds me of the openness of Twitter in its early days, which is both wonderful and concerning, because, as with many once-open social media platforms, it’s still beholden to its investors who sooner or later want to see a profit, either through a functional business model (which it does not have yet) or an acquisition. It is not enshittification-proof nor billionaire-proof. I suspect its investors will see true decentralization as more of a risk than an asset and it seems possible that long-promised functionality will be on the back burner indefinitely. I’d really like to be wrong about this!
Maybe it’s okay for us to not learn a larger lesson from the previous generation of social media apps beyond “X sucks, let’s move to something else.” Maybe it’s fine to ride the waves from platform to platform over the years as they cycle from idealistic and great to enshittified and troubling. But a declining social media platform can hold its users in a vice-grip long after it’s become socially destructive, as evidenced by my posting this originally on Facebook¹, as evidenced by many people continuing to use X throughout the 2024 election season, as evidenced by many still using it even now. I don’t know what this means for how people should approach social media. Mostly, I wish our options were better.