Fediverse graybeards always knew how Bluesky (and Threads) would play out. We know multi-billionaire Jack Dorsey belongs to the big club that you ain’t in.

In an article written in Japanese, the author points out the differences in maliciousness between Bluesky and other Fediverse services.

For example, while Mastodon administrators can access blocking lists that include federated users, Bluesky's access is not limited to administrators and is publicly available as a fully public API not found in the official app.

https://clearsky.app/whitehouse-47/blocking/blocked-by

Both Mastodon and Bluesky fail to implement measures such as notifying users of this fact when they make their first reaction, but Bluesky's particular maliciousness lies in its excessive disclosure of API permissions.

At least I believe Bluesky should have limited its API permissions to the same level as Mastodon.

This openness is not truly freer or more controllable. In the end, it only seems to be a different form of control.

Even politicians, social media personalities, KOLs, and influencers are migrating from old platforms to spread the same toxic behaviors once again.

reddit's influence on both lemmy.world and piefed proves that people are still herd-able so long as you use keep reinforcing the narratives that enabled you to herd them in the first place.

they seem to have been built only for programmers, developers, engineers, digital experts, or technology investors.

these are the only people are capable of navigating this impending -- and self imposed -- world of AI driven panopticons.

The irony is that people fled centralised platforms for more control, then discovered that radical openness can create a different kind of lock in. Just because data is portable doesn’t mean privacy is. Protocols optimised for developers don’t automatically produce products ordinary people actually want.

So a couple things here.

But everything is open, and everything is indexed.

Even who you block, who blocks you, when you usually use an app, your daily time, what your previous usernames were, etc... and more are all recorded.

You really can’t have an open, decentralized social media system without things like this. Privacy was never a promise of the decentralized web because privacy is more or less a result of there being fewer people with keys to the kingdom and you trusting those people not to share your data. But by its very design federation and decentralization protocols need there to be more than one entity with the keys to the kingdom because all the kingdoms have to interact with each other. The only alternative here would be running your own social media service that doesn’t federate with any other à la Truth Social, so you can have total control, but then that wouldn’t be very social or decentralized.

However, actually understanding it and managing it is far from easy for most ordinary users who know little or nothing about programming or technical systems.

Does this mean that Bluesky and the entire AT Protocol community are ultimately designed only for programmers, developers, engineers, digital experts, and people with technical expertise?

No, the opposite. The AT protocol was designed specifically to combat this issue because ActivityPub is so unintuitive and complicated for less technical users. A standard user will pick a PDS service hosted by someone else and unlike with ActivityPub, they really only need the one and can switch between them without losing all their followers and follows with ease.

If I were to sum up your grievances, I would say that your issue is that you don’t like social media and don’t appreciate how social ATproto is, but that’s what it’s designed for. And in fact that’s what Lemmy and Mastodon and all these ActivityPub apps are designed for. It sounds to me like what you want is to just not use social media. Or at the very least, you want a centralized private platform where you can be in total control. Those exist, but ActivityPub and ATproto are antithetical to that goal.

Blue twitter

ActivityPub compels you to stand by your words like an adult in the public square. You are not invisible, and you never will be. That is precisely why many people do not speak out online. To express oneself is to expose oneself.

Absolute anonymity belongs to the person who does not speak out.