We need better ways to sell people on decentralization, AT Protocol, and Bluesky than telling them open networks mean they won't have to suffer through losing yet another platform to an Elon Musk.
Decentralization is Insurance
www.aaronrosspowell.comAug 15, 2026 at 1:16 AM
How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.
Benefits of an open network
While Bluesky looks like other social apps, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network.
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.
We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky
If we don’t act soon, our online world will continue to be run at the whim of capricious billionaires.
Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
Bluesky: An Open Social Web - Bluesky
We’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data.
Bluesky Protocol Services
High scale open social, unlocked for every builder. Bluesky operates public infrastructure for the AT Protocol — Jetstream, Relay, and the Bluesky API — as open services anyone can build on.
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 […]
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
Bluesky trust and safety is too important to be left to Bluesky
Bluesky is open about almost everything, except setting and enforcing their community guidelines. They have an opportunity to lead the Internet forward, but they need to start now.
Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization | bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)
This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" blog post. I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protoco...
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Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization | bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)
This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" blog post. I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protoco...
Bluesky is not a social network or a product or a service, it is fundamentally a promise - a promise that you can decide — with others in your social geography — where you want to be in the digital world, and you don’t have to lose all of the bits that represent you in the process.
Aaron Ross Powell
Is Bluesky dying? Is it the community's fault? Should people here refrain from criticizing journalists who think J. K. Rowling might have a point? The thing is, it doesn't matter. Because the answer isn't to make Bluesky change. It's to take advantage of Bluesky's tech to build something else.
Bluesky should go back to invites, continue aggressive bot bans, create a Craigslist-style marketplace (since you’re more likely to buy/get services from a educated or good person on here than any other social network), and market this place like a walled garden protected from enshittification.
This is a really insightful thread that points out some of the fundamental issues with the Bluesky community vs Bluesky as a decentralized protocol. This thread is also why I think it's a really smart move for Bluesky to appeal to fandoms... (cont.)
B. Prendergast
One of the Atmosphere’s big bets is that the next 100m users will be won by making decentralised tech + data sovereignty more compelling. I’m less than convinced. We may be solving problems only builders care about, while overlooking problems that actually make ordinary people choose a network.
