@hamishcampbell @_elena

Running out of money just happens. I think the kind of management decisions that let you make money without cannibalizing the ecosystem are hard to do. I wish the Bluesky team luck in it.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The biggest danger for the whole open social web is that we put all of our eggs in the Bluesky basket. And if they claw back or collapse, we might not have enough happening outside the blast zone to recover.

@evan @hamishcampbell @_elena

Actually think the most likely scenario is that they continue to operate at a loss and are funded by crypto VC interests, or outright billionaire oligarchs, with the purpose of coralling liberal voices and managing their reach through increasingly restrictive algorithmic manipulations.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

So, I think there are two important things people in the Fediverse movement can do to help with these possible outcomes.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The first is to keep building on ActivityPub. I love our protocol and our ecosystem, and I think it's a wonderful network. But it's also a necessary hedge against clawback or collapse.

@hamishcampbell @_elena

The second is to encourage all the work making ATproto and the ATmosphere open and independent. Taking the stack to the IETF is great. So is the independent DID corporation. And the patent statement helped a lot. Let's keep up that momentum.

@hamishcampbell @_elena the good part is that this is what we should do in the best case scenario, too. So, all worthwhile.

@evan @hamishcampbell @_elena

The real benefit to the corporate and oligarchic owners is that the existence of Bluesky inhibits the growth of a truly open, defensible powerful public social media.

Everyone who participates on that platform is effectively working against the interest of building a strong alternative to corporate domination of the public's access to information.

@hamishcampbell @_elena one other thing: bridging is really important for us all right now. It's how we can tell developers to implement ActivityPub and still get access to the BlueSky audience. I hope everyone works to support BridgyFed.

@_elena I had heard about Attie but I didn't know what it does. It sounds a lot like Bonsai, the project from Princeton:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10776

@_elena I actually think this is a great use of AI. Using LLMs to let us find interesting information, stay better connected with our friends and family, be better informed citizens, challenge our assumptions, stay cognitively healthy, all seems like a great application of technology.

@hamishcampbell @_elena oh, also, thanks for the kind words!

@evan @_elena

That's a very political answer.

@mastodonmigration @evan @hamishcampbell @_elena Evan is mostly good at openwashing boot licking.

@mastodonmigration @hamishcampbell @_elena I won't argue with this. Having two incompatible stacks hurts the entire ecosystem. When developers and decisionmakers see that, it makes them want to sit back and wait to see what comes out on top.

I think our best mitigation for that right now is reassurance that investing time, energy and money into ActivityPub will not be a waste.

@hamishcampbell @_elena lol

@evan @hamishcampbell @_elena

Slow and steady wins the race. It is just frustrating that people are so easily distracted by bright shiny objects.

@evan @hamishcampbell @_elena I agree w/ most of this my only issue is the bridging which I avoid most of the time. It always seems low quality and one way. I know threads.net is an activity pub instance within the meta ecosystem but a post from a threads user just seems insanity more natural even though it's one way. When I see a bridged bluesky post it's just a weird one way link that reminds you it's a bridge to bluesky every change it gets. Do they want to participate or what?

@evan @hamishcampbell @_elena bluesky needs to maintain its own bridging infrastructure because having 10 low quality bridges that take me off the platform I'm on seems like bad UX at best and active sabotage at worst.

@MeaningfulBits

I agree, the smoother and more natural the bridge is, the better.