In 2023, Bluesky’s CTO Paul Frazee was asked what would happen if Bluesky ever turned against its users. His answer:
it would look something like this: bluesky has gone evil. there’s a new alternative called freesky that people are rushing to. I’m switching to freesky
That’s the same argument people made about Twitter. “If it goes bad, we’ll just leave.” We know how that played out.
Every new ATProto app makes this problem worse, not better. Each app tells you “sign in with your Bluesky account”, which really means “write more data to Bluesky’s servers.” The more apps that launch, the more users depend on Bluesky’s infrastructure, the less reason anyone has to leave. The protocol doesn’t distribute value across the network. It concentrates it. Developers are building features on top of Bluesky’s infrastructure for free, making it more indispensable with every app that ships.
Also, those central components are controlled by the USA-based Bluesky corporation.
This allows that country’ law enforcment and agencies to get their hands on all that data regardless of where it’s hosted (cf Cloud Act). A gag order can prevent Bluesky from speaking out (cf Gag order) so we would never know.
Federation was built into email from day one, which is why it was a killer app, why it couldn’t be coopted by one company[^1], and why we’re still using it today.
[^1] Though Google unfortunately has managed to gain enormous influence.
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