I created a Bluesky account! It’s here at @mcpar.land.
I believe federated web applications are truly, genuinely the Next Good Thing. They may not be the next big thing, but they’re the first genuine step away from the congealed internet of today, the “Five websites with full of screenshots of the other four.” Crypto shook out to be a scam, which honestly makes sense with its incentive structure. But federation doesn’t seem to have an incentive structure that leads to good outcomes - if it can get the flywheel of mass adoption started. Which Bsky seems to have just gotten. A serious of incredible management blunders by Elon Musk at Twitter / X has caused a huge migration over to Bsky, which appearse to have won out in public knowledge over Mastodon.
What does make me nervous is just how little understanding of the federated model the general public has. Big company messaging about ‘the cloud’ being an amorphous blob has won out in the general consciousness and just from field testing various explanations on friends and family, nobody seems to even know what a client / sever is. Scary! I’m considering writing up a series of posts explaining what federation is and why it’s fundamentally different from existing social media, for a target audience of complete laypeople. Not as in ‘what’s a DNS lookup’ laypeople, as in ‘what’s a server’ laypeople. No offense to all the laypeople out there, I love you.
I hope the flywheel keeps going. The best way to contribute to that:
- Use Bluesky
- Don’t use Twitter