from the making-the-internet-a-better,-more-decentralized-place dept

I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world. 

In the nearly three decades that I’ve been writing Techdirt I’ve been writing about what is happening in the world of the internet, but also about how much better the internet can be. That won’t change. I will still be writing about what is happening and where I believe we should be going. But given that there are now people trying to turn some of that better vision into a reality, I cannot resist this opportunity to help them achieve that goal.

The early internet had tremendous promise as a decentralized system that enabled anyone to build what they wanted on a global open network, opening up all sorts of possibilities for human empowerment and creativity.

But over the last couple of decades, the internet has moved away from that democratizing promise. Instead, it has been effectively taken over by a small number of giant companies with centralized, proprietary, closed systems that have supplanted the more open network we were promised.

There are, of course, understandable reasons why those centralized systems have been successful, such as by providing a more user-friendly experience on the front-end. But there was a price to pay: losing user autonomy, privacy and the benefits of decentralization (not to mention losing a highly dynamic, competitive internet).

The internet need not be so limited, and over the years I’ve tried to encourage people and companies to make different choices to return to the original promise and benefits of openness. With Bluesky, we now have one company who is trying.

For me to get involved with Bluesky now, to help its efforts, is a logical next step, given how we got here. Nine years ago, right here on Techdirt, I wrote about a “half-baked” idea of separating out the “protocol” of social media from the companies providing social media services. And, almost exactly five years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University published my much deeper dive on “Protocols, Not Platforms.”

That paper laid out a more complete (though still not fully baked) theory of how a decentralized, protocol-based social media system might work to create a better (though not perfect) world for online speech. It would be a world where we retain the lessons we’ve learned about from giant, centralized players about how to make platforms so user-friendly, but which brings back the promises of user autonomy, privacy, competition, and empowerment.

I’ve been clear all along that such an approach can never solve all problems, because that’s impossible. But it could create a better framework and better incentives for a better, more open internet, where user control is more important and impactful than centralized control.  As power over the online experience moves to the ends of the network, rather than the center, it allows for more expression, more creativity, and more solutions that everyone is now free to develop and use.

That 2019 paper received plenty of attention, and many people reached out to say they wanted to make that vision a reality. But the most serious and thoughtful person I spoke to about the paper was Jay Graber, who is now Bluesky’s CEO.  She had already been thinking deeply and researching similar ideas. Unlike most others I spoke to, she not only believed in the vision of a more decentralized internet, but saw a clear path to making it a reality.

Over the years since then, I watched as Jack Dorsey & Parag Agrawal at Twitter embraced the ideas of my paper and funded Jay to try to build a decentralized social protocol that actually worked and could achieve mainstream adoption. Importantly, Bluesky is not alone in trying to pursue this new reality for the internet, and I’ve chronicled many of the various developments being made by many others engaged in this world-improving project of decentralizing the internet. And while I support many of the attempts at building decentralized social media systems, Bluesky remains the most interesting experiment in the space.

Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality. And while I’ve offered informal support and advice in the past when asked, I’ve never had any formal or official connection with the company, until now. When the opportunity arose to join the board it seemed, after some thoughtful conversations with Jay and others on the board and at the company, to make sense to make that relationship more formal, allowing me to better help Bluesky make this vision a reality.

The challenges are already exciting. One of the key things that has fascinated me about Bluesky is that they have made it clear from the beginning that they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat — which is why building an open protocol is so important. In my view, one of my roles as a board member is to ensure the company stays true to that more open vision, and resists the pressures that could lead it down the more enclosed, centralized path that has captured so many of its predecessors.

One other aspect that has kept me interested in Bluesky is how the team there understands that most users not only don’t care about that decentralized vision, and shouldn’t have to care about that vision. Those users just want a service that works well, and works for them. Many other decentralized social media networks have focused on different approaches to building their communities, which is great. Experimentation and differentiation is how we will figure out what works for which communities. But I particularly appreciate the emphasis that Bluesky places on building a system that works for a wide spectrum of users.

And, while there have been hiccups along the way (and more will come), the company has consistently built thoughtfully with users in mind, while still staying true to the underlying vision. As a result it’s built unique and exciting features like algorithmic choice, an open source labeling system, and “hidden” federation — most users have no idea the system is federated, and that’s the way it should be. You should be able to build a decentralized, open, protocol-based social network without most users knowing or even caring about it. You should be able to build a system just as usable and feature-filled as traditional, centralized social media systems, while still creating underlying technology and infrastructure that prevents it from exploiting users like those centralized platforms do.

It is, of course, exciting to see thoughts I’ve expressed for how to fix the Internet actually start to become tangible reality, which is why I’m excited to be involved with Bluesky to help it continue to move forward.  

But I am still a writer, with many more thoughts to continue to express.  Including here at Techdirt, which won’t change.  We’ll still be writing about the Internet as it is, and as it should be, as well as the legal, technological, and sociological forces that keep shaping it, just as we have for more than a quarter of a century.  

This is somewhat new territory for me. While I am on my own company’s board, as well as the boards of two non-profits, this is the first outside corporate board position I’ll be taking. So because I am now wearing that second hat I will endeavor to be as transparent as possible when wearing this other hat.  I don’t foresee it being an issue in most cases, including when writing about any of the larger, centralized commercial platforms — the editorial independence that has always left us willing to call things as we see them, to either praise or criticize, as warranted, isn’t going anywhere.  I still want a better internet for users, and getting there still requires being able to speak the truth about where we are right now.  But for stories involving Bluesky, decentralization, or other competing decentralized platforms I promise to be as transparent as possible, and if necessary hand off stories to others (and even remove myself from the editing process) when my two hats may be in conflict.

But I don’t plan to shy away from those stories altogether.  Over the years we’ve tried to chronicle here at Techdirt as much as we can about the internet we have, because that record is itself important to be able to reflect on, especially if better choices for the future are to be made.  And I still have that job to do.

Filed Under: atprotocol, decentralized, jay graber, open, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: bluesky