Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
No, we can know. Again, this stuff is measurable.
Books resulted in a mass expansion of literacy, tools for mass education where before culture had been distributed through apprenticeships at best. It eventually enabled news distribution at a scale that just wouldn’t have been possible before, which in turn is a key element of liberal democratic revolutions.
Social media has been in place for almost half a century now and it’s done none of that. None.
I’ll give it this, it was easier to work from home during the pandemic than in the last pandemic. That was a thing. I won’t even give it full credits, because honestly the biggest improvement there was point to point logistics making it so we all got back to having toilet paper pretty fast.
Every now and then something gets crowdsourced in a way that would have been difficult before, but it’s not widespread and not the main use of the tech, if it involves social media at all. There is no revolutionary upheaval of the socioeconomic system anywhere, beyond taking the semi-oligarchic gatekeepers we had before and removing the few limitations on fact checking that used to go with them being able to decide the official version of reality.
If we find a revolutionary application of social media now (and again, it hasn’t happened yet), it will be something else. We’d certainly label it differently. Many techbros think it’s AI. I think they’re probably wrong. But it’s certainly not gonna be social media of any kind.
50 years is nothing. Its not even a generation. Tech might move faster than ever, but collective human culture, the REAL core of it? The truly basic stuff, like “anyone can learn to read”, is as slow as ever.
Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.
Did you not understand when I layed out how global communication can facilitate learned compassion on a global scale, allowing for world peace? As well as the kind of decision making that doesn’t destroy the planet? That’s my “revolutionary application”.
How if, we can stop caring about whatever men like Putin and Trump care about, on a cultural level, then the way people like them navigate society can become utterly unacceptable on a socially fundamental level.
And before you say, “that’s stupid, it’ll never happen” that’s probably what the nobility thought about peasants learning to read.
I think that every person on earth has the capacity to be raised into a compassionate being that would not sacrifice the well being of others to enrich themselves beyond their basic needs. Or at least enough of us can be, that the ones who can’t, are too few to matter.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Or maybe, in a couple hundred years, it will be untinkable that children ever worked in sweatshops.
Yeeeeah, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. Let’s leave it there.
Fine.
I’ll leave you with this. Modern media might go through a hundred times more content every passing year.
But I think the average speed at which people can change their minds, or the number of times the average person does it throughout their life, is exactly the same as it was ten thousand years ago.
There is a maximum speed at which collective humanity can figure certain things out, and while some things are happening faster than ever, others, are happening at a fixed speed and at a scale no-one alive today will live to see.
I want you to think about what that means when it comes to the way mankind learns to apply something like social media, or any other technology, towards doing good.
The change I hope social media can facilitate, isn’t the kind that happens in 50 years. It’s the kind that happens over several hundred. Maybe more.