Bluesky will never be a digital town square

Sorry, it's another Bluesky thinkpiece. I meant to have this out at the height of Bluesky thinkpiece fever, but I missed the window and can't be bothered to wait for the next one. So let's get it all out of the way up top:

Is Bluesky dying? Is Bluesky a liberal echo-chamber? Is Bluesky going to kill X? Will Bluesky users ever grow a sense of humor? Will Bluesky ever become a "digital town square?"

No. Categorically. On all counts. But it's the last question I want to focus on. And maybe expand on a little bit.

A Digital Town Square?

I'm not going to pretend you haven't heard the term, but just for completeness. "Digital Town Square" (or "Global Town Square") is a term that entered the public consciousness alongside the ascent of Twitter. Indeed it's a term that Twitter increasingly affixed to itself via public statements from executives over the years. And the media - as it is wont to do - increasingly transcribed those press releases and reported them as factual truth. This culminated in Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, calling it "the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."

Now, is this high-minded idealism from passionate executives? Is it cynical marketing from people trying to inflate the value of their investment? Does it matter?

Many thinkpieces have been written about whether or not X can be considered a digital town square. And they always get mired in the same literal dissection of the metaphor. "Oh well my town square has a farmers market and a library and a..." And, like, I love hearing about your cute little town, but this doesn't help us dissect the way corporate social media platforms impact our ability to hold discussions both on and offline.

So let me say this. X is not the digital town square, and every time that lie is repeated, we as a society lose a little bit more of our ability to hold discussions in a shared reality. Indeed, to quote a lovely article I read recently: "control over X’s algorithm (and chatbot) is [...] not about telling individuals what is correct, but it is about influencing what people think about what other people think."

What people think about...what people think?

The article I linked to does a better and more succinct job explaining this point than I ever could, so go read that. But even so let's give it a shot anyway.

Every time someone repeats the lie that X is "the digital town square" it perpetuates the myth that anything worth being talked about is talked about on X. And, transitively, it perpetuates the myth that anything being talked about on X is mainstream political, civic, scientific, or cultural discourse.

Therefore, whoever controls the algorithms that power that platform, controls the very definition of mainstream discourse. This is the power of the delusion and the power wielded by corporate social media.

I don't care to re-litigate "corporate, for-profit social media bad" because you've heard it all before. Ragebait, engagement farming, algorithms and dark patterns optimizing for dear god any kind of engagement please so we can make number go up forever. And when your "digital town square" has those kinds of incentives...is it really mirroring public discourse and opinion? I mean, maybe in some sick way, but it's definitely not worried about the long-term health of such discourse.

So where does Bluesky fit - or does it?

So, what, we should aim to have Bluesky be this digital town square instead?

No. A single, hyperscale, global platform - centralized or otherwise - necessarily prevents coherent and intelligent discussion more than it could ever possibly facilitate it. I don't care how "ethically" the platform is designed, and the scale of the platform doesn't even need to be so large before it starts to break down.

Indeed, we can see it on Bluesky every day already! I alluded to this above with "will Bluesky users ever grow a sense of humor." My posts never seem to hit the Discover feed (🤞), but if yours have you've seen this. Or maybe you've seen it on others' posts. Or maybe you follow The Louvre of Bluesky and see only the best organically-sourced examples of this.

Try to make a joke? Have an informed conversation with other subject matter experts? Even just share a mundane detail about your day? Boom: Context collapse!

You want to talk about the latest issue of X-Men? While there's a genocide going on?! You want to discuss use-cases for AI to detect and remove low-quality AI results from your custom search engine? Even though every single prompt uses as much water as Lake Michigan?! Make a funny joke about current events? Even though the DOJ is suppressing the Epstein List to protect our rapist president?!

When any post could end up in front of any person, communities can no longer have private, well-informed discussions that require a high level of shared context without a bunch of dumbasses yelling wrong shit from the sidelines. You can't share a fact or opinion about a specialized field without, again, a bunch of dumbasses misunderstanding and suddenly your post is being shared alongside misinformation by malicious or simply ill-informed laypeople.

When everyone is on one platform, there's no good way to signal "it's not about you." Bluesky offers some features geared towards this, such as limiting replies, but they are not bulletproof and come with their own trade-offs.

Alright, well what's the point?

My point is that our views of how social media interacts with society and with civil life has been necessarily colored by infinite-growth capitalism and by centralized corporate platforms.

To completely destroy a famous quote, we cannot simply "build a more ethical horse" here. Swapping X for Bluesky and everything else stays the same doesn't actually get us anywhere better.

Sure, some things might get better. Better personal moderation tools, shared block lists, whatever. But, by and large, you're still hitting the human limits of a global platform. Multiple unaffiliated communities all getting jammed together in the same place creates a huge amount of tension and prevents communities from effectively managing themselves.

Instead, we should focus on ensuring the AT protocol that underpins Bluesky evolves into an engine, infrastructure, and overlay that powers a new generation of communities that challenges the foundational belief that the single platform with the most active users should necessarily lead the conversation.

That is, ATProto developers and users should do their best to help the protocol finally deliver on the oldest promises of the open web. We should be using these new tools to build new things.

But...how?

Yeah, I mean easier said than done for sure. And unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to offer any real answers here.

Where ATProto doesn't (yet?) offer you a ton of control over the literal privacy of your data, it does have building blocks for providing a little bit more control over where and how your data is used.

The building blocks of ATProto - PDSes, Lexicons, and Appviews - provides very expressive and extensible community-building tools for sufficiently-motivated builders.

I'd love to see more projects for hosted PDSes with better migration tooling, so the choices aren't (1) bsky-hosed or (2) self-hosted. I think it would be really cool to see communities collectively host PDSes for their community members.

I'd love to see some kind of Appview emerge - either bespoke for a specific community or reusable by multiple communities - that can help build venn diagram communities. Allowing users to keep some data or discussions internal to a community while still participating in the broader ATProto ecosystem where they want to. And it doesn't just have to be microblogging either.

If we simply must extend the "town square" metaphor, I'd love to see more unique neighborhoods with their own vibes and cultures going up around town, even though we all stop by the town square from time to time.

I see the beginnings of this starting to form and I am heartened. I see Rudy Fraser and the rest of the Blacksky team working tirelessly and making real progress in all of these areas. I see Northsky making strides in PDS decentralization. And tons of other individual and community projects that I don't have the brain space to call to mind at the moment. I know I'm not breaking new ground here with this post - I've been watching people much smarter than me work much harder than me at this for a long time.

The sooner and more completely we can move from "Bluesky is like X except not owned by Elon Musk" to actually challenging the fundamental shape and place of social and community spaces on the Internet, the better for everyone. Including killing the myth of the digital town square.