Over the course of the last month, members of the Berkman Klein community, representing academics, activists, lawyers and technologists, came together to discuss the Twitter BlueSky project. The discussions culminated in this “meta-proposal” for the BlueSky team and community, which presents suggestions on how to go about considering proposals and building out BlueSky.
Wait, I googled what Bluesky is. Are they working on a decentralized network or did I misunderstand?
Twitter (at least their CEO) claimed they were interested in a decentralized form to allow more communities. ActivityPub, Matrix, Status etc were mentioned. But it seems these harvard people would like to build a new one instead of joining and improving the existing.
My colleague was approached for the BlueSky project and just forwarded the message to me, laughing as they’re an author on the original ActivityPub W3C recommendation and apparently Jack is just straight up ignoring it.
When Jack posted that idea, I remember seeing Christopher Lemmer Webber & Evan Prodromou mention ActivityPub to Jack right there. Oh how this world works :(
Amazing. Gotta love the corporate web.
This meta-proposal basically recommends all the same foundational principles that the fediverse is built upon, so I’m curious to see if Twitter follows this advice.
In terms of legal business structure, BlueSky should be structured as a non-profit entity and should maintain its open-source commitment. At the outset, we do not think BlueSky, as a base protocol, needs a revenue model.
Twitter doesn’t have a profitable business model right now, it will be interesting to see if Twitter is successfully able to pivot to become a for-profit company whose primary product is not-for-profit.
Hopefully some interesting innovations come out of the project, and it’s at least a step in the right direction.
Obligatory XKCD
I like the publicity this gives to fediverse. I do not think ignoring existing protocols right from the start inspires hope in as much as Twitter and Harvard do not explicitly mention existing options. I hope I am wrong in the long run.
I would be happy if they setup shop somewhere else and stay off activitypub. If they come in with opt-in echo chamber prevention analytics, business models, DMCA screening, ID2020, influencers, shadow bans then it’s a giant step backwards.
I agree. It is hard to see how a centralized powerful entity would cede that power to a decentralized system if their aim is not to turn decentralized communities into name-only but centralized in practice.
