The progressivist web had better migrate to Mastodon, not Bluesky

With the Trump/Musk election[efn_note]and what we're gradually discovering about how Musk put X to work for Trump's victory, or about the growing influence of right-wing tech in the U.S.[/efn_note], social network X (formerly Twitter) is seeing a new episode of massive “departure”. Or more precisely, competing social networks are seeing a new episode of mass arrival. Which isn't quite the same thing. And not exactly new, since such episodes have been happening regularly since Elon Musk bought X.

If a large number of users are looking for a less toxic space for expression, many are leaving (for some⋅e⋅s permanently) X for moral reasons[efn_note]Better late than never, I personally felt back in December 2022 that Twitter had (already) become the new Truth Social, and that leaving it had become a moral choice[/efn_note]. And so, the social network that's swelling at the moment is Bluesky.

So last week, I went and created a Bluesky account, just to see. I've read quite a few articles on this social network, some glowing, others much more nuanced, and a few very negative[efn_note]You can find them in my watch[/efn_note]. Today, I've made up my mind: the progressivist web would do well to migrate directly to Mastodon, not Bluesky. And why not? Because, unless we're hoping for a miracle, Bluesky is the next TwitterX.

Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, the same man who created Twitter. Can you see the beginning of the problem? Bluesky is financed by big Silicon Valley venture capitalists, not those who are content to create a decentralized social network for the common good. We had the right to be naive in the mid-2000s, when the social web was sold to us as a utopia. Not so today. Among Bluesky's investors, early supporters and first employees, we find the crypto-galaxy. The one that actively campaigned… for Donald Trump[efn_note]The crypto industry plowed tens of millions into the election. Now, it's looking for a return on that investment[/efn_note].

In moral terms, then, Bluesky may be a very young social network, but it's already not very convincing. But we now know that ideological and political projects play a decisive role in US tech. On the economic front, Bluesky is in the hands of the classic Silicon Valley Big Tech. To hope that it will do anything other than what all the other Big Tech companies have done (profit maximization, progressive enclosure, attention economy, personal data capture, increasingly intrusive advertising, viralization of toxic content, etc.) is to believe blindly. It would even be tantamount to believing in miracle(s). You'd have to believe that a capitalist company, financed by crypto-addicts and American techno-solutionist VCs, is really going to design a technical infrastructure that is genuinely open-source and interoperable. For the common good and general interest. On the (very) long term[efn_note]Here, we need to keep in mind Cory Doctorow's excellent concept of the “enshitification” of digital services. He discusses the Bluesky case in a specific article[/efn_note]. Hello! Do you remember OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), which was originally a non-profit association whose aim was to produce open science on AI?

In short, the progressivist web, especially its more militant parts, don't have unlimited time and energy. I think it would be in their interest to save a little time by skipping the Bluesky stage and migrating directly to a Mastodon instance. Or more broadly, to discover the Fediverse[efn_note]Which goes beyond Mastodon with many other social platforms that can communicate with each other[/efn_note]. It's not perfect, of course, and there are still a number of issues to be addressed: financing (because nothing is free), moderation and ergonomics. Of course, like any new tool, it takes a little getting used to, and a lot of getting used to. But it exists, it's functional, and it's progressing every day!

Progressivist Internet users in search of new points of reference, we're waiting for you.

This article was translated with the help of Deepl, so don't hesitate to point out any inconsistencies or mistranslations.