Blue Skies, Or The Purple Nightclub?

BlueSky is nice, but I think I'm still partial to Farcaster.

It seems like every emergent social platform over the past few years eventually has its ‘moment’. Some are able to capitalize and ride that moment into becoming sustainable; some fizzle and land in the consumer social dustbin of history, next to MySpace.

Two have captured my attention recently: Farcaster and BlueSky. I’ve found myself instinctually drawn more to the former, and really want to explore why.

Decentralized Origins

In the world of decentralized social media, Mastodon had that moment in 2016 after a VICE article gave it exposure as ‘Twitter, without the Nazis’. In actuality Mastodon became the dominant player in the ‘Fediverse’, a group of services that began with GNUSocial and the OStatus protocol, and led to Mastodon being the most well known. It has since dropped OStatus in favour of the ActivityPub protocol.

Mastodon has had a few more moments since then, it has seen growth but it never seems to stick as a Twitter alternative for a few reasons: It’s difficult to use, doesn’t have portable identities (there’s no way for you to ‘move’ servers), and in general doesn’t have user friendliness as a high priority.

During the last crypto cycle, that flavour of decentralized social starting gaining traction. Lens and Farcaster are the most popular, with some design choices like content on-chain vs off. They both take slightly different approaches, but are firmly in the protocol side of social media. In other words, they are a set of instructions rather than a discrete platform like Twitter.

Of these two, Lens has more users. Farcaster, also known as ‘The Purple App’ due to its logo, has prioritized slower growth and is the most Clubhouse-like of the two. It’s currently invite only and has a small but close-knit community. Both require interaction with crypto wallets, and in light of crypto’s litany of recent issues, they will not be the first choice of the crypto-averse.

A Bird, and Blue Skies

Enter BlueSky. Originally an initiative at Twitter but now a separate entity, BlueSky is yet another attempt at a decentralized social media protocol. The protocol itself is named ‘At’, in reference to the ‘@’ symbol that is used to denote a username on traditional social media. Some unique innovations are integrating DNS entries with identity, which has proven to have an immediate side benefit of verification.

To change your username to reference your domain, you’ll need to edit DNS records. If you can do this, it can be assumed that you own the domain in question. If you’re not Gwen Stefani, for example, it’s unlikely you’d be able to edit records for https://gwenstefani.com. This makes domain compromise more of a concern, but deals with the matter of account verification quite elegantly.

How does At work? I don’t intend to answer that question here, but an even more macro-question: How does decentralized social media work? For extremely complex protocols, the high level view is actually fairly straightforward. We take one platform, and split its compute, storage, and users into different logical (and probably geographical) units.

The United Federation of Social

One form of this is called federation, and not the Star Trek kind. Much like the United Federation of Planets however, it’s a grouping of relatively even top-level servers that talk to each other. So the federated ecosystem for a particular social network would have an equivalent to Earth, Vulcan, Romulus, and so on.

Put in a more real-world way: Individual Mastodon servers federate with each other, and Fediverse (ActivityPub) servers can federate with each other. If web2 social follows a ‘one big playground’ model, decentralized social media means more, smaller playgrounds that can interact.

After this starting point, things get complicated when design questions are asked. Are identities portable? How long do we store posts? Where does moderation happen? Can federation members block other members? It’s that last question that is one of the most interesting ones.

The Romulans were painted as a fairly militaristic, somewhat secretive society. It might stand to reason that the Romulan Senate doesn’t want society to be able to communicate with people from Earth. In order to do this they would likely impose some kind of communication blackout, and this also has happened within the Fediverse.

Mastodon’s early (and still dominant) culture leans on the ‘bubble wrap’ side of things, and early on there was a huge conflict over servers not having codes of conduct. Those without were often referred to as ‘so-called free speech’ instances, and ended up on blocklists. Not individual users, but at the server level. Mastodon server A would not let members see any posts or communicate with people on Mastodon server B. Like minds might want this to happen at the protocol level.

Protocol governance is the elephant in the room with social media as protocol. We have some reference implementations such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but we are breaking new ground with these protocols. To some degree, we’ve moved decision making from Trust and Safety apparatuses within individual companies to protocol governance entities. One such entity might be thought of as the Federation Council.

All this said, I don’t intend this to be a technical post. Instead, one focusing on community. It really doesn’t matter how elegant the underlying protocol is if no one’s using your network. Community is also far, far more interesting when it comes to decentralized and composable social media. Composable, put simply, means building your experience from individual components. You can choose your client, your feed algorithm, your moderation algorithm, and so on.

Digital community is a passion of mine, being a person of advanced age I’ve watched them rise and fall from the earliest IRC channels I was a part of, to the forums era, to web2 social media, social audio, and now decentralized social media. Communities are generally why people join and leave digital spaces.

Tech’s SoHo House(s)

In Silicon Valley circles, invites to private TestFlight betas or social media platforms are the new status. The SoHo house membership of the tech set, they are often traded for favours, and sometimes even money. At the height of Clubhouse’s popularity, they were being sold on eBay for $1500.

To get an invite to Farcaster when I joined, you had to message one of the founders on Twitter. Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan are the founders of Farcaster (FC), and are pursuing a very intentional and slow growth strategy. At the time of writing, FC has implemented a true invite system in terms of users being given the ability to give invite codes to others.

A few of the ‘big accounts’ were initial invitees to FC like Marc Andreesen, Balaji Srinivasan, and other e-celebrities in Silicon Valley circles. These people churned very quickly, and Dan has said that it was a mistake to focus on this demographic so early. The platform as it stands today is definitely crypto native, but in general has been fairly neutrally curated. One of FC’s north stars is ‘credible neutrality’, and is definitely a place of ‘builders’ rather than ‘creators’.

As a result, FC has a vibrant developer ecosystem, key to the new world of composable social media. There are some user created clients, and services like Eventcaster which will create an event page if a user replies to a cast (Farcaster calls posts casts) with @event. A separate platform called Unlonely is a sort-of web3 Twitch, with streamers creating content and viewers being able to spend cryptocurrency to perform actions like change scenes. If you’re familiar with Twitch culture, this is very much a crypto implementation of people making donations via Streamlabs to play songs or Youtube videos on a stream.

If I had to characterize FC community and culture, it is kind of like an independent cyberpunk-esque nightclub for builders. It’s also something that seems to have been cut out of whole cloth, with new approaches communication norms. In the early days, screenshot essays materialized instead of threads (although they have now largely fallen by the wayside). I view social media as a type of co-creation, and I think it works best when it’s building on this kind of truly fresh ground, like the barren playa at Burning Man.

There are some parts of Farcaster that I don’t currently enjoy, but I did enjoy that they were new. Social media is most enjoyable to me when it delivers new things: People, norms, topics, etc. It’s why I recall my Clubhouse experience with so much fondness despite a lot of it being unpleasant due to trans hate; it was a brand new type of platform.

My experience on BlueSky was a bit different. I was sent an invite by someone I met on Clubhouse in 2020, ironically. When I joined, the platform was not super active. I knew one or two other people, and communal activities involved things like using a thread to count to 100 and trying to keep sequence.

I occasionally posted, mostly when I was errand running in Vancouver. Things like the view from the North Vancouver docks. There didn’t seem to be a critical community mass until the TPOT (This Part of Twitter) community began to join en-masse. As of this writing it seems like tpot has largely left Twitter for BlueSky.

Without getting too deep into weird Twitter lore, TPOT is adjacent to the rationalist and post-rationalist subcultures. I’ve often described the community as weird, smart, interesting people. There is a tendency towards excessive positivity / life coachey-vibes in certain corners that isn’t my bag.

What I really liked about early Clubhouse was that we had real discussions on serious and divisive topics, and managed to avoid any sustained conflict (for a time). A pretty remarkable feat, especially during the charged atmosphere immediately following the death of George Floyd.

BlueSky was kind of neat and cool for a while, and it did feel like whole cloth too. Things like the counting thread were interesting. After TPOT established dominance, the familiar overtook the new and I started to drift back to Farcaster.

Is Coziness Bad, Actually?

As I sat down to write this, I tried to puzzle out why the coziness on BlueSky is making it less amenable to me than it once was. I once implored Paul Davison, founder of Clubhouse, to avoid enacting moderation policies that would paint over the interesting parts of Clubhouse with that inoffensive shade of corporate beige. In answering my own question, at times it feels like there’s a fluffy brush of good vibes that paints over things on BlueSky.

Someone from Platformer who is a current user shared something from their discord which chastised the team for not having moderation tools yet, with a side of well, clearly they haven’t learned anything. I’ve watched the dance between the tech press and operators of early consumer social platforms play out again and again, one that is both exhausting and disappointing.

I hold the opinion that I’m about to lay out as both a marginalized demographic, and as someone who bore the brunt of transphobic hate on Clubhouse until I eventually had to leave a platform which I really enjoyed as an active participant.

The dance goes something like this: A platform has the ‘be excellent to each other’ rule, something happens, and they rush some half-baked, very bubble wrapped moderation system in amidst the tech press throwing as much shade as possible. A large amount of the time the Trust and Safety industrial complex dictates best practices.

It’s been going on since Twitter largely launched the Trust and Safety paradigm in creating their T&S council as a reaction to Gamergate. Opaque structures of governance created in the wake of the prime culture war proxy battle. This has little relevance to decentralized social networks, but it’s the model that the tech press has ingrained in their minds.

Back to BlueSky. The team has stated that moderation is a must-have prior to going public and that Jack Dorsey has unsuccessfully resisted that stipulation. On the one hand, you might say that BlueSky has indeed learned from previous mistakes and is doing this in a reasoned manner to avoid the dance I’ve outlined above.

I have noticed, though, that there is some self-censorship going on in service of ‘until moderation is in place’. In terms of community itself, BlueSky does seem to be doing the one thing I wished previous services have done: Community management. Invites are biased towards people with ‘the vibe’, which is probably a better metric than ‘investors’ or ‘people we should give invites to so the NYT doesn’t write a hit piece’.

On Clubhouse, certain people were given unlimited invites. Some on the cap table, some in an effort to diversify the population. I was an indirect beneficiary of the latter, in that my invite was given to me in a later round of onboarding where people could apply to be on the platform. I was informed in late 2020 that this was a second attempt at diversification.

Clubhouse tilted towards the music industry amidst repeated accusations that the platform was all boring VC’s (something very untrue). Clubhouse tilted too far, realized it, and then offered invites to the original population (pre-September 2020). Music industry Clubhouse took it poorly.

BlueSky has already had this moment in realizing that TPOT dominating the platform was not good for a heterogeneous ecosystem, and invited some people on the waitlist in. Farcaster handled things a little differently: The invite system has worked out to people messaging Dan Romero on Twitter until very recently. I can’t really say that I noticed any particular bias in new Farcaster users, aside from usually being crypto-native.

A Farcaster friend described the FC invite process as neutral, which I think is true and squares with credible neutrality. People on FC are generally very nice too, such that blocking hasn’t really come up as a serious issue yet.

BlueSky invites that haven’t been done via the waitlist seem to be handed out by the team on-platform, sometimes randomly, sometimes very selectively. FOMO marketing is definitely working. I wouldn’t say BlueSky invites are as prized as Clubhouse invites once were, but I think they’re close.

There’s a certain pageantry present in users posting threads about their criteria for doling out scarce invites, something that is very reminiscent of Clubhouse. There is a time factor as well (I believe it’s 2 weeks for new users getting 2 invites), but that seems like it’s likely to change.

This is undoubtedly where you might be inclined to say, wait! This is a decentralized protocol! Soon it there will be no invites and you’ll have everyone here! Had I not been present for much of early Mastodon, I would agree. Those statements may be true, but the ‘flagship’ instance holds weight over the general ecosystem even when instance diversity accelerates.

Dominant Flagships

Mastodon.social (the Mastodon flagship instance), and the Mastodon open source project heavily leaned left, and that still permeates the network today. There’s also the matter of how easy it is to stand up a Mastodon instance, and how many people will actually bother doing so. A tutorial I wrote on Medium about how to get an instance running on Linux was one of my most popular articles on that platform; it is depressingly complex.

A lot of this really boils down to how opinionated a protocol is, but in the community aspect, not the technical one. A technically opinionated protocol, in general, prescribes how something should be done. If it’s un-opinionated, it’s largely left up to the developer.

I would love it if a protocol was un-opinionated in regards to community. One of FC’s taglines is ‘sufficiently decentralized’, I think it’s also sufficiently community un-opinionated about who Farcaster is ‘for’. There doesn’t seem to be a specific vibe or community segment that is being curated. From what I’ve been able to observe, BlueSky is far more opinionated on this aspect.

There’s also the vibe from the team itself, which is one of the most interesting differences between Farcaster and BlueSky. The BlueSky team’s vibe is chic and Very Online. I like the Farcaster team’s vibe more, but it’s a little hard to describe. ‘More serious’ isn’t quite it, but the vibe I get is that Farcaster is more concerned about iterative user experience/feedback than BlueSky is. Perhaps this is another way of contrasting opinionated vs un-opinionated.

You should filter my thoughts here through a tiny little sour grapes filter: I was given a few invites beyond the initial 2, but no more despite asking (and sweetening the deal with a promise of bringing some of my e-girl colleagues). Others have been given a lot more (ranging between 20 and 40 from posts / screenshots of invites). I’ve not been shy with critiques, so I’m not expecting any more before the platform goes public. ‘Be the change you want to see’ is spiritually true but objectively false when social graph growth opposes your tribe.

I think that TPOT establishing early dominance has made organic co-creation more difficult, something Venkatash Rao alludes to in saying that Farcaster is where you go to meet / learn about new people, and BlueSky is more like Facebook in that it’s a digital space for people you already know. This isn’t objectively bad, just I think a waste of potential for a digital space that is likely where most non-crypto natives will go.

There’s also the developer ecosystem to think about: People do want to build on BlueSky, an early (now defunct) bot was an AI incarnation of a rubber duck that had full conversations with BlueSky users. Feature requests keep accumulating, and there are community-created Github repositories. The team has been fairly receptive to these efforts.

Farcaster is more mature here, not only in the number of projects but also how they are handled. Some time ago, a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) was formed called Purple, which uses its treasury to fund Farcaster projects (and recently approved a proposal to hire a developer-in-residence). Nothing like this yet exists for BlueSky, but some early discussions point to something similar being created.

Someone I know described BlueSky as a bunch of people trying to be influencers, another described it as sometimes resembling a cuddly Yoga-circle. It’s sometimes hard to say why I prefer Farcaster, there’s plenty of banal-posting on it. I think it’s the lack of prescription, despite a close-knit community, there are few norms.

On BlueSky, if my post doesn’t fit with the ‘vibe’, I think that it should. Or I think about how to rewrite it so it fits better. BlueSky feels less like a completely barren playa and more like an established music festival. If you don’t like Drum n Bass, you probably won’t like the music at Bass Coast.

Twitter is on track to start circling the drain, with even Silicon Valley insiders like Paul Graham taking swings at Elon Musk. BlueSky occupies an odd liminal space: It looks like Twitter, it obfuscates cryptographic elements enough to be perceived as ‘another Twitter’, Jack Dorsey is on the board of directors. Some BlueSky users have threads with some of these facts as part of the pitch to get people to join the platform.

My interpretation of BlueSky’s eternal September is not necessarily that anything existing was displaced, but the potential for something was. We are also, though, talking about a temporary community. As composability increases, and the floodgates open, BlueSky will be a litmus test of sorts for decentralized social. With at least 1.2 million people on the waitlist, even a phased onboarding will dramatically change how things look.

As Sarah Jeong said in 2017 in her article on Mastodon, it’s possible I’m just a little too mean for the culture that’s developed on BlueSky. I like some measured amount of trolling, biting repartee with tribes that oppose mine, etc. I also want to hear offensively interesting things. I find that sometimes on Farcaster, and almost never on BS. I hope that changes.

Composable Moderation: New, or a Blast from the Past?

Composable moderation is another new element to decentralized social. Much like the rest of the ecosystem, this means users can subscribe to whatever moderation style suits them. If team bubble wrap is your thing, you can subscribe to their lists of labels / users / etc. If you prefer the Wild West, you might subscribe to none of them. This seems new, but it’s really a decentralized flavour of the group block lists that marked the beginning of the ancient times during which culture war proxy battles like Gamergate took place.

Even prior to Gamergate, the Athiesm+ blocklist/bot was used as a centralized form of composable moderation. If the platform’s governance wasn’t to your liking, you could subscribe to this service and have a list of the marked automatically blocked. During Gamergate, Randi Harper ostensibly created the ggAutoblocker bot to serve much of the same purpose.

The existential risk, here, is that once again early ecosystem dominance will rob decentralized social media of its promise. I would be less concerned if I hadn’t witnessed how the left-leaning denizens of Mastodon defeated decentralization with fairly ubiquitous instance blocklists. Jane summarizes it pretty well here (CW stands for content warning):

As I mentioned, not having a code of conduct was enough to having your instance un-personed. In one case, a legacy fediverse instance that wasn’t technically capable of federating with Mastodon servers was put on one of these blocklists.

The chilling effect that Jane talks about was very real. The hecklers’ veto people took that unlimited palette of human expression, and limited it to the inoffensive shades with enough threat of consequence for painting with forbidden colours that most wouldn’t try. I met some of my closest friends during Mastodon’s initial popularity, but we soon went back to Twitter when it became clear we were in bubble wrap country.

I’ve seen some inklings that at least BlueSky’s flagship instance is also going to tilt towards bubble wrap. Some very unserious beginner trolling such as people posting ‘I’m going to be BlueSky’s first sex pest / groomer / etc’ seems to be cited as proof of impending danger by the team. Those posts are kind of like the ‘cozy’ equivalent of trolling, ironically: Banal and inoffensive.

At its current size, BlueSky is more like a social club than a decentralized network. During the TestFlight era, Clubhouse also felt that way. In the end it’s possible BlueSky’s social club just isn’t for me. It feels less like Summit and more like intersecting group chats, some of which I like, some of which I don’t.

There’s something a bit too saccharine permeating the air at the moment, kind of like a painfully artificial cotton candy body spray (Calgon, I’m looking at you). I hope that will change with growth, but I have a suspicion that Bluesky will follow in Mastodon’s footsteps. That’s probably good (for the company).

BlueSky becoming the Facebook of decentralized social would be a massive win on many fronts: A real web3-like use case that succeeded, verification that anyone with a domain can leverage, giving displaced Twitter users a home, etc. That I prefer Farcaster is also good, because it validates the marketplace of protocols.

Social media protocols won’t just be technical specifications, but real communities. Protocol governance members and dev teams will become de-facto community managers, and make a direct or indirect statement on who they want as part of those communities.

I’ve derived value and new connections from both Farcaster and BlueSky, but I think you can only vote once between similar protocols with your presence and attention. I’m doing so in Farcaster’s direction because I feel like my presence has more of a direct impact on how the protocol develops, and that Farcaster wants me to have that effect. I think ‘which protocol wins?’ is the wrong question to ask, because they’re running in different races.