Bluesky appeared some years ago as a strong decentralized alternative to Twitter, selling themselves as a progressist place, being the opposite from the other “billionaire big tech social networks”.
More recently they receive criticism, especially about moderation. Jay Grabber, bluesky’s CEO posted recently that the users can choose another moderation in the atproto space, if the main bluesky one is not good.
But there are some problems here.
User behavior
Despite the fact of having technical solutions to it, it’s not so simple. I have been using bluesky for almost 2 years now, and one thing that always shows up is the difficulty of people to understand what a decentralized network is, how the protocol works, etc.
The users know the private network space, they use apps from Meta, X, and the experience is different. Having an open protocol gives power, but some weak points, as well.
For example: it is very hard for common users to understand the limitations of the protocol. In other apps they have soft blocks, they can remove followers, can have private accounts, all features we still don’t have in bluesky (and are quite complex to implement, if not impossible).
For non-technical users, all the problems and slow release of features that demands changes to protocol seem like incompetence (I know this is not true), but this is the current feeling.
The common user behavior is: download an app, create an account and have all features built by the company that’s publishing the app.
And here the problem begins.
It’s not a technical problem
Bluesky and atprotocol are moving forward to allow users to move and come back from PDS, the moderation is not applied in the app layer. So, if the user doesn’t agree or like the bluesky’s PDS rules or moderation, they can go to other PDS, or other moderations. So we have a solution, right?
Not so fast.
First of all, moving to another PDS is not an easy job. It requires some steps that can scare common users. After that, even if you were successful in changing it, other users need to do that to really have an effect.
If all your mutuals and friends are still using bluesky’s PDS and moderation, they will still not see your content. Most users will just download the app and follow the defaults, the default is bluesky app and they know it.
The skipping of moderation is a social thing, and that is much harder than to follow a technical tutorial. Bluesky faces it in their dispute of users with X. Even with all problems related to Elon Musk’s management, most users that like micro-blogging are still there.
I live in Brazil, and last year, X was blocked for some days. A lot of users moved to bluesky, but their experience there was not nice, with a lot of complaints about missing features, the UX of the app, etc. X comes back after some time and the users move back there.
Even users that were liking bluesky, moved back, using as reasons the opportunity to have discussions with right-wing people, or that all users related to a specific field were there, so they needed to be there as well.
Bluesky lost a lot of users for not having some features and a strong posts recommendation algorithm. They are facing the problems of fighting against user common behavior, and at the same time, they are cynical about the moderation subject.
The bet
I really want to see how this PDS, moderation and client competition will be in the future. In terms of technical problems, the amount of time developers will need to invest and the costs of servers are challenges, especially because common folk don’t have venture capital money to spend on it.
Maybe some competitors will need to sell the access, to make some money and achieve financial sustainability. The accountability and security will be pain points as well.
But communication will be central: they will need to make users feel safe doing those changes, especially in terms of automatic moderation of images and videos and in respect of local laws.
I really hope to see this competition to create solid alternatives that can be foundational in terms of a new microblogging platform concept. Where people can connect, without being trapped in private spaces, such as other big tech apps.