I was also in the early pre-Bluesky group. It was chaotic and there were a lot of contradictory pressures on the group. Some people wanted Bluesky to be a twitter replacement, tech Twitter itself would eventually use. Others wanted it to be a way of solving the problem of social media platforms becoming stagnant because the platform owners could control and limit innovation by locking down the API. Still others wanted it as a way to get out of an impossible moderation problem where a single entity or person had to decide who could say what how.
@npub1eejn...pt3l was a former zcash dev /
@npub1jcwu...jyrz activist whoβd been building a decentralized social events app / meetup clone called happn. Sheβd done some SSB (secure scuttlebutt) development but I think happn was on its own protocol she made. It never took off so she had time on her hands to work on the Bluesky research. I remember being very impressed with her work and spent a while trying to talk her in to co-founding the company which made planetary.social and now
@npub1pu3v...tfch. The thing is Jay was available and did the work on Bluesky before it was Bluesky the company or theyβd created the ATprotocol.
It wasnβt clear that Bluesky would need to make a new protocol. That was the reason for the research paper. Lots of people showed up and participated in those invite only discussions. Most had a project to pitch, lot of them used some shitcoin or another. Jay was pretty agnostic. She did the work of looking at the protocols and wrote up a good summary. She was also paid by Twitter as a contractor to do that writing. Probably that was what let her have the time and focus to become the founder. Lots of us pushed for Bluesky to be a separate legal entity because we felt if it was Twitter inc project eventually someone would kill it.
A bunch of us applied to be the CEO of Bluesky, myself included. While there is a lot Jay has done which is different from how Iβd do it and Iβve got some big disagreements with some of her choices, you canβt deny that what she built is working. Does it do everything Iβd want, how Iβd want? No, not at all. But it has provided Twitter with an open protocol alternative.
I think Bluesky went off a couple ways. One is a lot of IPFS folks got involved and over complicated the protocol. Layers upon layers of tech and abstractions. Secondly is trickier, their user base wanted a more moderated and tightly controlled system than Bluesky was trying to build. They moved away from openness in part because they were listening to their users. But they could have build ATprotocol to work in a permissionless way and made the bsky.app part permissioned as their users demanded. They also could have built the protocol in the open, but instead if you want to contribute to ATprotocol, you need to be an employee. Jay herself signs off on every change to the spec. Itβs a very top down way of working, which has worked for them, but isnβt prefigurative in building the world we want with the values we want that future world to have.
