Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
How would that even work?
Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.
Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.
/s if it's necessary
No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.
It’s solvable if you’re willing to self-host your PDS.
But I’m skeptical of the attempts to make a PDS an “everything account.” Why should you use the same PDS for your social media posts and your git repos and your blog posts? Seems like we need to get better at locking things down in practice before that kind of centralization?
I'm probably in the minority though.
Bluesky Social, PBC runs a PDS service (bsky.social) for free, there are a number of free public alternatives, and thousands of users self-host.
Self-hosting your own PDS can be done with Raspberry Pi or $5/mo VM and requires very little work. It runs in a Docker container with SQLite.
It's completely straightforward and it works. Tens of thousands of users are doing it successfully.
They hold the keys for your DID. If they don't allow you to move to another PDS, you can't move. The original theory was that you'd hold the private keys, but that's something that would hugely limit adoption so they decided to hold the keys themselves.
In terms of moving your backlog of posts to a new server, part of the issue is liability (not merely legal liability, but reputational as well). When you have a user on your platform and they're posting stuff, you're moderating them in real time. If they turn out to be a horrible troll, you've get the reports. Let's say a horrible troll has been on EvilServer and EvilServer has been ignoring the reports against them. They now want to move to your GoodServer and bring all their post history with them. As an admin of GoodServer, you can't see that everyone has been reporting this troll for years. They're now moving over lots of horrible, inflammatory, potentially illegal posts to your server.
The author's concern seems to be more focused on impersonation
I'm asking this not bc I like enshitification, but the app view design seems such a perfect fit for user data mining/targeting, that it's hard to believe it was not part of design consideration in day one.
This is just how the web works, and there is no easy around it without losing features people care about. Sure, you can do client-side encryption and pretend serve can't see the plaintext, but it's just a theatre, see Hushmail incident for example.
And having people export uber-key by default is pretty terrible idea. Sure, allow advanced users (like post author) to do it. But for the common person, the exported key is just another way to get account compromised, via malware or backup provider hacking. Or if they are not backing up stuff, then the key will get lost next time they upgrade.
verdverm•1h ago
singpolyma3•1h ago
ftfish•51m ago
What I see here doesn't look good.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
Never mind the pivot to reddit.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit...
adithyassekhar•50m ago
bikelang•29m ago
pessimizer•40m ago
jacobgold•34m ago
Bluesky has sustained 1M+ daily active users and 3M+ monthly active users for roughly two years, and there is no obvious reason to believe it will fall substantially below that number.
It is also in the process of adding (decentralized) subcommunities, which I expect to have a huge growth impact.