And then, as you know, Elon backed off [on the acquisition], and that disaster happened [laughs], until he finally bought it, which was the worst timeline ever. But throughout all that, it became more and more evident that Bluesky had a lot of great ideas. And they’re ideas I believe in. I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers.
But what happened is, people started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter. It’s the thing that’s not Twitter, and therefore it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd.
I’m impressed with the iterations of the algorithm that they’re doing. I think it’s generally really good work. My only ask is to open it up even more and let people choose what algorithm they want to use, even write their own algorithms to filter all the conversations. To me, that would give users ultimate agency, and ultimate freedom. Because this whole ‘freedom of speech, not reach’, is yet another tool of censorship in the end, because the algorithm is determining reach. If you truly believe in the freedom of speech, you gotta go to the heart of where it’s now being decided. And that’s not the policy, it’s the actual algorithm itself.
Mike Solana
On some level, I admire Jack’s commitment to decentralization and his idealism around freedom of speech. Alas, we live in the real world, not in some abstract, platonic realm of ideas, and thus we need to compromise and accept constraints in most situations – any ideal can devolve into delusion if it becomes mired by absolutism and does not recognize its inherent limitations.
You can’t have free speech without accountability; you can’t build a community without trust and shared rules. And yet, some of Dorsey’s remarks on decentralization simply reflect a desire to dodge responsibility over moderation choices and pretend that all rules are unnecessary or burdens on the individual. The idea that algorithms should be the ultimate filter through which people experience the world, that everyone may basically decide what to consume – and by extension what to believe – seems utterly dystopian, even nihilistic to me. Restrictions and rules exist to help us grow and mature, and recognize each other as human beings. This hypothetical ‘freedom’ has no intrinsic value if there’s nothing to contrast it against, and may be easily corrupted when people take certain freedoms for granted.
I have come to recognize similar ideas across many tech initiatives, this blend of paranoia and distrust directed at larger societal structures and blind faith in the absolute truths of digital technologies that are supposed to ‘fix’ and ‘save’ us from human imperfections. Encryption advocates insist that we need unbreakable encryption to protect us from the encroaching surveillance state, ignoring how it’s used to obscure criminal activities from law enforcement. Bitcoin devotees fear Wall Street, ignoring its energy consumption, poor usability, and – again – its prevalence in illegal activities. Free speech absolutists imagine decentralization and an algorithm for each of us, ignoring how very few have the time or capabilities to write or evaluate such algorithms, leaving room for big corporate actors to consolidate and centralize. People in tech look increasingly divorced from reality, and so their ventures will gain less and less traction in the mainstream.
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