When The Community Wants Something

I think, Bluesky (the Company) and the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) that it built might be the first time that Web2.0 (Social Media) has been given a real fresh outlook on life. After all, we have this new tool at our disposal where almost all parts of the social experience exist as separate pieces living on different servers and apps. It feels in a way like Web1.0 but now we can take our identity from place to place. Take this blog post for example. I can just yeet it out into the Atmosphere (what we call the network) and you can see it on any site that implements Standard.Site with a News Feed. But that's not what I'm really here to talk about. What I'm really here about is what happens when the Bluesky Community wants something. We can actually take Standard.Site as an example. Standard.Site began as a operation between Pckt, Leaflet, and OffPrint. Some of this is technical, some of it's not. All three of these sites are blogging focused sites, all three solved the same issue. Long Form posts on the Atmosphere. So these three got together and decided that the best thing they can do is come together and just work on the same basic foundation. The Standard.Site Lexicon. These sites aren't some big Silicon Valley operation with enough money to fight god twice. All three were started by individuals all seeking to create something cool with the tools they have. Recently Bluesky (the company) added integrations with Standard.Site into the Bluesky Social App. Which is great! How did that happen though? A lot of people are used to their apps being closed source things that require a big corporate entity makes literally all the decisions. Bluesky by contrast is not like Twitter or Meta. Sure, yes. The company makes a lot of missteps and regularly gets pie in the face, and I personally have been quite critical of the dev team and moderation team. By contrast to Twitter and Meta, Bluesky is Open Source, and they accept contributions from outside devs. So how does the community get stuff it wants? Well two primary ways. - The community comes together and forms an organization and raises capital and uses that as leverage to get features they want. This is probably the most expensive way to go about things since it would have to be in the millions of dollars since we have to compete with the Bluesky Devs other priorities for development time. - The community comes together and establishes an organization, volunteers time and/or raises capital. Then we can have community developers fork the Social App and Protocol repos and develop our own features, and then commit them back upstream to the main projects. This is probably the cheapest option in all reality. For example, a community dev could easily add Picarto to the Going Live notification, which Bluesky hasn't done yet. Then when the community org tests it they can just push it upstream. Bluesky devs test it, merge the pull request, and BAM. You can now use Picarto as well as YouTube and Twitch and what ever else Bluesky currently has. The first option uses collective bargaining power, though it's not likely to be successful since we'll be competing for Bluesky's team's limited time. The second option though is the most likely to be successful. Why? We can control our own team. Does that mean we could get private accounts? Well Bluesky is working on that right now and it's all on the protocol end, it's not just something you can wave a dev at and it'll work. It requires expanding the architecture of the protocol and testing that to make sure it doesn't break what already works; and currently governance of the protocol is purely at Bluesky (the company) but they are planning to shift that to an external neutral body. What could we do? Well we can contribute to the protocol. We can expand or fork the Bluesky Social App. We can contribute to Lexicon.Community. We can do a lot of stuff. Standard.Site has shown us that we don't need to be limited by what is. That we can come together and build something and have it recognized. This was more or less a brain dump than anything else.