(Photo by Michal Mrozek on Unsplash)
In the waning days of the Twitter brand, co-founder Jack Dorsey was talking about his social media platform like Victor Frankenstein being tortured by his run-amok monster.
His relationship with Twitter had all the makings of a Romantic-era horror. He had stitched the platform together from a lifelong passion for instant messaging, and since then it had earned him the ire and scrutiny of presidents, Senate committees, and activist investors.
Now a certain sink-wielding oligarch was about to drain the platform of a few billion dollars of brand equity, and maybe in Dorsey’s mind, this was exactly the self-immolation the monster needed to undergo.
“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter,” he said in a tweet on April 25, 2022. “It wants to be a public good at the protocol level, not a company.” Selling Twitter to SNL’s go-to Wario impersonator was “solving for the problem of it being a company,” and given the result, I can only assume he wanted that solution to be zero.
Dorsey’s altruism is mostly a self-assured myth. No doubt he saw the potential for public good in Twitter, but he was also talking about profit models from the get-go, praising the benevolence of his beast while locking it away in a tower made of venture capital and ad revenue. Despite this paradox, he was right: Twitter, up until recently, had always behaved like a protocol. Governments, corporations, activists, comedians — everyone treated it as if it was a utility. But the purchase of the platform by the meme-slinging techno-brat made it clear that Twitter was no longer a public good but a privately owned plaything.
So, is Bluesky here to save the day? By now, you’re familiar with the platform that siphoned escapees from Twitter to reach 20 million followers in a relatively short time. Dorsey himself was part of its development (before inexplicably paying fealty to his original beast once again). In appearance, Bluesky behaves like a Twitter clone similar to Threads. But underneath it is the dormant dream of a decentralized social media experience, one where users have more ownership of their online presence.
So, can it separate platform from protocol as Dorsey sporadically envisioned, so each person can decide what kind of monster their social media is going to be? Maybe, but it has some adoption hurdles.
The first hurdle is getting people to understand what a protocol even is. I’ve been on the internet since the early 90’s, and I’m still educating myself on the nomenclature. Granted, most of us are familiar with interacting with protocols. If you’re reading this blog, you’re using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with ease. And if you have an email address, congratulations: you’re already surfing on a wave of protocols that let your email talk to everyone else’s, no matter where their email is hosted.
This is what the AT Protocol, the beating heart inside the rib cage of Bluesky, is trying to emulate for social media. Much like your email address, your social media profile can be hosted by a provider of your choice. In this case, Bluesky would serve as a client in the same way Outlook allows you receive and publish emails. It brings to life the idea of a decentralized social network, one where profiles are a multitude of funky houses connected by common streets, rather than one-bedroom apartments owned by a single mercurial landlord.
Being able to host your own social media account has clear advantages. You can own, archive, and transfer your data more easily, and your profile is not as captive to the whim of mercurial ultra-capitalists. Right now changing your Bluesky username to a self-designated domain is easy enough. But as of this writing, fully hosting your own Bluesky account requires a degree of tech savvy.
This is the second big adoption hurdle to making the Bluesky dream a reality. Currently most users are hosted by Bluesky themselves. To me this isn’t a huge problem, analogous to people starting accounts with WordPress.com versus hosting the WordPress CMS on their own. But like WordPress, I can’t imagine many people going through the rigamarole of hosting their own Bluesky account, unless hosts like GoDaddy and the like provide similar managed services. If decentralization is truly going to be the next phase of social media, it needs to be more easily understood and readily accessible within a lower level of technical prowess.
I’m hoping for Bluesky’s success. I want an open social media protocol that gives me greater control of the content I make and consume, one that is less susceptible to Cory Doctorow’s enshittification principle. Right now on Bluesky I am witnessing more of the wacky, irascible energy I remember from Twitter’s earliest days. But it needs to become more than just an X escape hatch. I’m hoping that adoption of the AT Protocol will parlay that energy into a social media environment where curiosity, depth, and joy are easier to sustain.
Time will tell, but if we split the monster into pieces, maybe it can be more easily tamed.