Article by Mike Masnick
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Totally agree.
Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.
The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.