If I were piggybacking on years of other people’s work without contributing a shred of innovation myself, I’d feel embarrassed rather than proud. I wonder how much of that “innovation” and sovereignty would survive if Bluesky cut W off from its infrastructure. #grifters
Anna Zeiter
W Social just won the European Future Award for Business and Innovation! Congratulations, dear team! 💪🏻🤩👏🏻❤️🙏🏻
Oct 20, 2026 at 7:24 AM
Clouded skies for open networks
Last week, I finished an essay about platform design affordances and content moderation expectations and community-level context collapse on Bluesky for Tech Policy Press and set it aside to cool before a last read-through. An hour later, the Trump administration brought to Bluesky a propaganda-zombie army made
Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far
These days, everyone hates big tech, and that’s often for very good reasons. You shouldn’t trust giant centralized companies that have collected a ridiculous amount of data on you. There are few re…
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.
On discourse and decentralisation
Over the last year, as Bluesky got more popular, conversations about whether Bluesky and ATProto are really ‘decentralised’ have gotten more “popular” as well. These conversations ranged from high-quality, productive back-and-forth articles to people just saying a lot of dumb stuff on the internet (shocker, I know). As time went on, this discourse has grown […]
If you've signed up for Bluesky, you've signed up for offloadable moderation.
By now a lot of people have been lured to Bluesky with a mistaken impression of what they're in for. Foundationally, the reason Bluesky was launched in the first place was out of a desire to do less moderation, and so Bluesky's approach to moderation is all about creating excuses for offloading responsibility. This approach has predictable consequences.
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user.
Bluesky is backfiring. Mark Cuban says the 'lack of diversity of thought' is actually pushing users back to X | Fortune
The billionaire argues Bluesky’s liberal-heavy user base creates an echo chamber.
guys this is why we can’t have nice things “Naturally, X owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have capitalized on this unrest, with the former posting that Bluesky is a “bunch of super judgy hall monitors” and the latter proclaiming that X is the “true” global town square.
Bluesky backlash misses the point | TechCrunch
techcrunch.comThere's a pernicious belief, widely believed, that if a platform isn't on its way to becoming the biggest platform then it's on its way to failing. That belief is silly. So let's stop talking about Bluesky as if that belief is true.
We Needn't Have a One True Platform
www.aaronrosspowell.comi think, end of the day, the real problem with Bluesky is that most of its users are here *because* they want to be in a bubble. and they can tell themselves that it’s just about not being around Nazis it supporting Musk, and that’s part of it, but also there’s a palpable desire to be ensconced.
To be honest, I think this is more the ruling class in America manifesting that bluesky fails, rather than bluesky actually failing because they know they can't control it just by buying it out.
Mary Gillis
"But, two years since its launch, the site has around just 10% of X’s estimated global users." This is presented as a failure. At 2yo, having 10% of the users of its biggest rival, which is 20yo, is a failure. No tech is allowed to just be a success, it has to be a blockbuster or it doesn't count.
