How I’m trying to use BlueSky without getting burned again

I see a lot of individuals and communities in my network moving their primary social media presence over to BlueSky in the last few weeks. I’ve decided to give BlueSky a shot myself, and thought I’d share some of my rationale for why, and how I’m approaching it.

Don’t build castles in other people’s kingdoms¶

A lot of my thinking here is influenced by a great blog post called Don’t build castles in other people’s kingdoms. While the post is technically about the gaming industry, it has a lot to tell us about any relationship between users, platforms, and value creation.

The short takeaway is that you should create the most value in spaces that you control, and leverage platforms that others control to direct attention and value to your own spaces.

The longer explanation: platforms become successful because they allow their users to create value leveraging their platform. However, if that value is only achievable within the platform, then it’s not as valuable as you think. Platforms are fickle, and unless they have the right governance or the right technical framework to empower users to take their value where they wish, you run the risk of losing all of the value you create via a platform if you no longer wish to use it.

In other words: don’t build your castle in a kingdom that somebody else controls, because they can take it away from you. Instead, build a castle on defensible land, and leverage platforms to bring more ideas, people, value, etc to your castle.

How does this pertain to social media?¶

Social media networks are platforms, and they allow for a great amount of value generation like building a personal brand, encouraging conversations, making connections, building and organizing networks, etc. However, social media platforms are also controlled by a small number of financially or politically-interested stakeholders that will inevitably change the rules of the game. We’re playing in their kingdom, not ours, and we saw what happened when “their kingdom” became “Elon Musk’s kingdom”.

In Twitter, many of us had built personal brands and generated an enormous amount of interesting and useful ideas via their platform. You had long, well-thought-out, and insightful threads being shared by leaders in their fields. You had conversations and major announcements being shared via tweets on the platform. Then Twitter got bought and began to become a place that we didn’t recognize.

All of that value is now trapped within Twitter. Why? Because we shared it in a way that was trapped within Twitter’s kingdom. One option would be to stop using these kinds of platforms altogether. Another is to continue leveraging these platforms, but also directing real value back to spaces that are more reliable. This is what I’m going to try avoiding with my engagement in BlueSky.

Assume BlueSky (or any platform / service) will go away in three years¶

My guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. It’ll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this (though Cory Doctorow is still skeptical about how enshittification may play out with BlueSky) but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.

So I’m going to try treating BlueSky as a temporary place to make connections or share ideas, but do my best to direct attention, deeper thoughts, “real” value to places that I have more control over. Here are a few examples:

• Rather than long tweet threads, I’ll write blog posts and share a short primer to direct attention to my space.
• Rather than treating my BlueSky relationships as “real”, I’ll try to invest in those relationships outside of the platform if I want them to live beyond that platform’s existence.
• Rather than sharing BlueSky links in “learn more about me” slides etc, I’ll lead with links to my website.
• Rather than treating BlueSky as “the space” for community-specific conversations, I’ll encourage folks to drive those conversations to community-specific spaces (like Discourse, Discord, etc).
• Rather than treating BlueSky content as persistent (and thus referenceable in things like blog posts or papers), I’ll try rendering conversations into a static form before including them in my writing.
• OR, I should assume that these kinds of references will break, and decide that this is still fine for the convenience of being able to use them anyway. Not everything needs to be persistent over long timelines!

I hope that some of these principles are useful for others, and would be keen to learn how others are approaching this new space.

Why not use Mastodon?¶

A lot of folks are also suggesting this is a chance to double-down on Mastodon. Unfortunately I just haven’t seen the energy and critical mass there to suggest that this is going to happen. If social media is about having interesting, dynamic interactions with people, then you need to go to the place that maximizes the chance of this happening.

In my experience, Mastodon just hasn’t gotten there. For example, one of its core features - federated servers and identity - is actually a pretty confusing UX pattern for the vast majority of people that don’t care about that kind of thing (“you’re telling me there’s a @choldgraf@hachyderm.io and a @choldgraf@mastodon.social and they’re two different people?!”). Moreover, while having federated servers means that communities have more control over their norms and rules, it also means communities have to do a lot more work to understand the idiosyncratic policies of each server. These are features if you think of a social networks as a tightly-interconnected and self-contained community, but the appeal of these kinds of platforms is having global reach to people that you may otherwise never have met.

For these reasons, or for whatever other reason, it doesn’t seem like Mastodon is getting the critical mass that makes it worth prioritizing over other social media platforms. I’ll keep using it, and we’ll see how this evolves over time.

And either way, my guiding principle will remain the same: I’ll assume these platforms will be gone in three years, and do my best to direct value off of them and into spaces that I, or communities I care about, control.

Appendix: The six rules from Don’t Build Castles in Other People’s Kingdoms¶

I’ll share the rules recommended in Don’t Build Castles in Other People’s Kingdoms because they’re a great reference - check out the article for more explanation:

• Build your castle on land you own
• Shamelessly use other kingdoms just like they’re using you
• Always move people back to your kingdom, never to another kingdom
• Operate like your castle can get shutdown tomorrow
• Be suspicious of new kingdoms that give away easy visibility
• Give good reasons to go back to the Castle in your Kingdom. And be persistent!