@_elena Sadly, it isn’t - and it’s painfully visible. @evan called this right from the start, and he was right on this.

This is #techshit, spreading a miasma over the #openweb. And when it inevitably fails, the rotting stink will linger, making it even harder for people to take the step they need to take.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

I see three outcomes for Bluesky:

1. They keep working on opening up the ATmosphere.
2. They try to claw back value from the developer ecosystem (FB and Twitter did this in early 2010s).
3. They run out of money and shut down.

Here, "they" means the current corporate entity or an acquirer. If there's another outcome I'm missing, lmk!

@hamishcampbell @_elena

If they stay open and of goodwill indefinitely, awesome. Great for everyone. People I've met and like there, like @mmasnick or @bnewbold.net , seem to want that to happen. 🙏🏼

The clawback scenario usually happens when there's a change of management. I think it's great that when that happened, Toni Schneider took up the CEO job. He's got a good background in Open Source and standards from Automattic.

The big clawback of the early 2010s came when FB and Twitter rolled out advertising as a business model. They needed more control of end user experience to make that viable. So, a big thing to watch for with Bluesky.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

@hamishcampbell @_elena

Running out of money just happens. I think the kind of management decisions that let you make money without cannibalizing the ecosystem are hard to do. I wish the Bluesky team luck in it.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The biggest danger for the whole open social web is that we put all of our eggs in the Bluesky basket. And if they claw back or collapse, we might not have enough happening outside the blast zone to recover.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The first is to keep building on ActivityPub. I love our protocol and our ecosystem, and I think it's a wonderful network. But it's also a necessary hedge against clawback or collapse.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The second is to encourage all the work making ATproto and the ATmosphere open and independent. Taking the stack to the IETF is great. So is the independent DID corporation. And the patent statement helped a lot. The existence of independent (afaik) *Sky projects like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky and Gander are good too.

We can help keep up that momentum with some bridge-building and encouragement from the outside.