I am skeptical that it can grow to be a network the size of twitter, be ran as a for-profit, and not enshittify. I can’t think of a single example that hasn’t. Bluesky has ran as a public benefit corporation so far, but it has to keep the lights on somehow.

It took twitter years to run somewhat profitably. Even then Twitter was enshittified before Musk bought it. Premium subs are probably the least enshittified way to raise revenue, but ads and algorithms meant to raise engagement towards those ads are very much enshittification in action. That “normal people” have a high level of monetization they are willing to tolerate, is just grease on the wheels toward enshittification.

I admittedly have a limited understanding of the full operation of ATProto so please correct me if wrong. Appviews/lists/feeds are supposed to be the defense of ad/algorithm enshittification, anyone could write an appview with a different algorithm.

And this is why I assume that the network can only be run without enshittification, is by a benevolent provider. If Bluesky becomes hostile to an Appview that allows users to bypass ads or engagement farming, users can move their PDS to another relay that isn’t hostile to it. But there still remains the underlying reason that Bluesky would theoretically have become hostile to it. I don’t see how blacksky, for instance, wouldn’t also have to eventually take the same steps.

public benefit corporation
This means nothing. Its a marketing term. Corporations do not have to maximize shareholder value.

Majority of the companies dont enshitify, we only notice the ones who do. The hosting costs wont be the majority of the costs it will be staff mainly moderation. Because bluesky has better tools for users to moderation it might lower that burdern. All that being said I hate bluesky and everything it is. It feels like its wearing open source decentralized culture as a skin to lure people in.

the startup costs of federation are high, but that was a technical choice.

that tells a lot.

Insanely well said. It seems like the goal with much of the discourse is just "my choice is right and everything else is wrong, and I'll work backwards from there". Not everyone uses social media the same way, not everyone has the same goals, not everyone wants the same features, not everyone values the same levels of privacy. And the running narrative with differing opinions on this seems to just be base-level tribalism. Just look at the insults here, lobbed solely because someone made an account with a social media platform that doesn't align with your preferences.

I'm sorry, but it's like you haven't read the post:

But every counter-argument to the concerns above rests on the same foundation: technically, users can leave. Technically, you can self-host. Technically, you can run your own relay. The capability exists at every layer. But people don't do these things. They never have with any protocol. Not email, not RSS, not XMPP. The default wins. Always.

It is always technically possible to do differently. It's computers after all: anything can be coded. And most people won't because they have their life to live. What matters is the default, and all the incentives point to the default being shittier as time goes on.

The most crucial point is the relay. Yes, appviews can work without, but then you miss everything that is happening which is probably the number one reason people go to bluesky rather than the fedi. Relays are a fundamental part of what makes bluesky attractive and they require large capital to run and maintain, so it all points to bluesky still running the main one that most will connect to

No, the main argument is that the main relay is, and for the foreseeable future will be operated by bluesky. This means that bluesky can decide what is and isn't visible, but that's not my biggest issue: to me the bigger problem is that bluesky sees everything that everyone says or thinks about anything.

Yes, it is possible to change. As TFA says:

But every counter-argument to the concerns above rests on the same foundation: technically, users can leave. Technically, you can self-host. Technically, you can run your own relay. The capability exists at every layer. But people don't do these things. They never have with any protocol. Not email, not RSS, not XMPP. The default wins. Always.

It doesn't matter that a few can be free: the vast majority goes where the lowest friction is because they have their life to live, and the lowest friction leads to the centralized bluesky

It costs $34 a month for an experiment. It doesn't cost anywhere near that for a node that is running, used by thousands/millions of people, ingesting millions of pdses. Don't be misled by a nice experiment. You need servers, backups, people to run that. See what real world deployment looks like: a little bit under 100k a year for the only independent full stack.

There's no need to self host as there's already public third party instances you can switch to.

Yes it's possible. It's just not the default. That's the issue

it's not something the fediverse is immune to either.

true, although no one said the contrary

This is just incorrect. RSS is probably one of the least centralised protocols right now, it's not even federated, which makes me question why the author even included it as an example

The argument isn't whether something exists, it's what people use: rss is amazing but it's far from being mainstream. The default path to following isn't rss, which is the point (and the problem).

It's not an argument against federation. It's an argument to look beyond the niceness of a tech.

This is exactly the dynamic the article was describing: concerns about power concentration get answered with lists of theoretical protocol features instead of engaging with how the network actually operates. Listing technical escape hatches doesn’t address who controls the dominant infrastructure in practice.

The overwhelming majority of users rely on hosted PDSes, the main relay, and the default appview. Whoever controls those layers controls visibility, discovery, moderation signals, and reach. That’s where practical power sits. Doesn't matter whether migration is technically possible under ideal conditions because if you'll need it they won't be ideal.

Acquisitions and policy changes can happen quickly. Tools that exist “yesterday” are irrelevant if users don’t act before control consolidates, and history shows that most don’t. Claiming decentralization can wait until the last possible moment ignores how network effects and defaults entrench power long before any formal lock-in occurs.

It’s also worth noting that the original article isn’t even arguing “the fediverse is better,” yet the response immediately reframes the debate as a comparison. Even if we entertain that framing, the situations aren’t symmetrical. Yes, a fediverse instance can block migrations or misbehave but no single party in the fediverse comes close to the infrastructural dominance Bluesky Corp currently holds across relays, appviews, and user gravity. An individual Mastodon instance misbehaving affects its users. Bluesky Corp fully controls the experience of over 99% of the users on the protocol and so holds the power to shape the experience of the entire network.

The issue isn’t whether both systems have theoretical weaknesses. It’s where systemic leverage concentrates in practice. And ATProto’s architecture, particularly the cost and complexity of running the more demanding components that need to have a global view of the network, structurally favors concentration at those layers.

The features are theoretical in the sense that there is no real guarantee they'd be possible after BSky corp changes their behavior and that they are in use only in the least significant way possible, for tiny and irrelevant numbers of users. But of course this is just restating the obvious again. For a network truly to be shielded against this sort of thing it should be decentralized already before.

See this for how constellation makes no difference.

sure and he left.twitter, him ostensibly leaving doesn't make it any better. The entire way its set up is the failure, it's yet another shitstain on the internet.