Summary
Journalists are increasingly abandoning X (formerly Twitter) for Bluesky, citing higher engagement and less toxicity. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X, changes like deprioritizing external links and rising hate speech have alienated many, especially marginalized groups.
Bluesky, founded by Jack Dorsey, offers a more welcoming environment, especially for journalists and activists, with 20x the engagement in some cases.
Reporters note better traffic, reduced harassment, and a focus on diverse stories.
Organizations like The Guardian and fundraising groups also report greater success on Bluesky compared to X.
It’s open source and designed to literally not be reliant on the company running it. Start a community appview and plc and you can bring your entire account history with you
These are aspirational goals and not at all actively true now. They are technically possible, but not actually viable as a social media network.
Its design was based on a drop in for twitter, and will always require a megacorp sized entity for it to operate, due to a “god’s eye view of all data” model requiring huge, faste data lifts to exist at all.
Best case is some opensource org like internet archive/wikipedia willing to spend 6-7 figures/month(raw costs +engineering talent) on running the service, but so far none have.
There’s already others running other relays. The appview is the most difficult, but in theory indexes on top of the data could be shared too which would reduce the need for each appview to have everything saved in advance
The relays are test level only. They are at the stage where people are dipping their toys in the water to see if it’s actually a resilient protocol.
There are no viable alternatives right now, and there may never be.
It’s not actually decentralized or federated, but keep telling yourself that.
Tell that to the people running their own PDS servers and the people running whitewind and all the other services built on the protocol