by jchw | 2025-09-01 21:04:11+00:00
> To the best of my knowledge, that kind of banning has only happened once[1] (I was one of the handful caught up in it lol). They reversed that ban when I complained. Unless you were banned at that exact time, what likely happened to you is that some kind of anti-spam filter thought you were a suspicious new account, agnostic of the content of the posts/accounts.

It was definitely around the time of that post. Here's the message I got around 10 months ago:

> Recently, we removed a Bluesky account you control for violations of our guidelines. After a thorough review, we have determined that the takedown action applied to your account was incorrect.

What struck me about this series of posts is how they still never acknowledged exactly what they did (which is, took down accounts using guilt-by-association) nor did they claim they wouldn't do it again, only that they made mistakes while doing it, and they didn't even bother to properly apologize for banning people incorrectly at any point. It reads as if they felt it was all fine and justified and that they will do it again, just, correctly this time, as if there is a right way to do that.

Even if they did stop this practice (again I truly doubt it), there are things you can do that, while they may feel reasonable and justifiable given the circumstances, are a permanent way to lose people's trust. For me this is one of them. I don't think anyone should feel safe hitting like on a post on Bluesky, unless you're absolutely sure it could never be found in violation of any rules. That's insane. Why would I want to be on any network controlled by Bluesky Social PDS when that's how they run it?

> There already are other apps working independently from all of Bluesky's infrastructure (save for plc.directory). I think the big thing holding the protocol back is that they have not implemented private data yet (and it's probably a couple years off). Lots of apps need that, so many apps would not want to use the protocol yet.

> I'm hopeful about the future of the protocol, because it does provide the aspect of decentralization I value most: your account is a signed repo and a private key (or several), and the network is necessarily fully open for any app to make use of however they want. Even client-side single-page web apps are feasible with generic backlink services (Constellation), which I find super cool. All that is needed now is time and app development.

I'm beyond bummed out because I was actually pretty excited for Bluesky early on, but I think they had a window that opened and closed for properly decentralizing. Bluesky today is a heavily curated and heavily moderated network that resembles absolutely nothing of what you would expect from a supposedly "decentralized" network, which is a load of shit for something whose entire draw was that in the first place. What they've created today is so centralized that they can feasibly close it off tomorrow without any impact on 99.9% of users. It's one thing to extol the virtues of its architecture, but that architecture hasn't really been proven to work well in a truly decentralized environment, which is not good when it has already been scaled to these heights. I don't just mean in terms of continuing to function and scale well, I mean in terms of how the network handles abuse and bad actors, and how Bluesky Social PBC will handle parts of the network that don't agree with their moderation policies. (i.e. Was it really wrong to spend so much time highlighting the issues with inconsistency in the Fediverse if ATProto winds up with the exact same issues where the world appears very different depending on what AppView you're on?)

While I admire Dan Abramov's work on React, his attempts to show that Bluesky decentralization is actually happening were to list two alternative AppViews, except apparently, one of them was actually not a full AppView instance. So actually, there is basically one known alternative AppView to Bluesky's AppView. Bluesky has something north of 38 million users, and approaching-100% of them are going to be using Bluesky's AppView. Given the utter lack of incentives to really run an alternative AppView, and the fact that nobody except complete and utter nerds will ever even find them, is there really any good reason to suspect that there will be any alternative AppViews in the long run, or if they exist, that any more than a tiny unimportant fraction of users will ever use them?

The Fediverse has had instances that have done dumb things, but the thing is, you can currently today actually choose any instance you want. A future where you can use Bluesky without the direct influence or control from Bluesky Social PDS in either your personal affairs or even just almost every single interaction you'll ever have is very distant. If we were to extrapolate, it doesn't seem likely the situation will have meaningfully changed in several years. I'd be willing to place bets that in 10 years at least 99% of users will still be on Bluesky Social PBC's main AppView. (To be honest, I wonder if anyone would actually be willing to place money on this bet. I kinda suspect even Bluesky proponents would admit that this is pretty likely.)