Cory Doctorow
I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
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Cory Doctorow
I appreciaate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/
But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were *all* started by people who swore they'd never sell out.
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Cory Doctorow
I *know* those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They *did* care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsen their services as the lesser of two evils.
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Cory Doctorow
Like: when your service is on the brink of being shut down by its investors, who demand that you compromise on privacy, or integrity, or quality, in some relatively small way, are you *really* going to stand on principle? What about all the users who *won't* be harmed by the compromise, but *will* have their communities and online lives shattered if you shut down the company?
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Cory Doctorow
What about all the workers who trusted you, whose family finances will be critically imperilled if you don't compromise, just a *little*. What about the "ecosystem" partners who've bet on your service, building plug-ins, add-ons and services that make your product better? What about *their* employees and *their* employees' families?
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Cory Doctorow
Maybe you tell yourself, "If I do this, I'll live to fight another day. I can only make the service better for its users if the service still exists." Of course you tell yourself that.
I have watched virtually *every* service I relied on, gave my time and attention to, and trusted, go through this process. It happened with services run by people I knew well and thought highly of.
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Cory Doctorow
Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.
In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs *on yourself*.
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Cory Doctorow
That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism
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Cory Doctorow
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose *owners* have high switching costs and whose users have *none*. An owner who makes a bad call - like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training - will lose a *lot* of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service.
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Cory Doctorow
If leaving the service is *free*, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users.
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Cory Doctorow
These devils only sit on your shoulder, whispering temptations and threats, because they think that you can make things worse without spoiling their investment. They're not cruel, they're greedy. They will only insist on enshittification that they believe they can profit from. If they understand that forcing you to enshittify the service will send all your users packing and leave them with *nothing*, they will very likely not force you to wreck your service.
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Cory Doctorow
And of course, if they *are* so greedy that they force your hand anyway, then your users will be able to escape. Your service will be wrecked and you'll be broke, which sucks for you, but you're just one person and your pain is vastly outweighed by the relief for the millions of people who escape your service when it goes sour.
There's a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It's called a "Ulysses Pact."
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Cory Doctorow
Ulysses Pacts are named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens' sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens' song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens' song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
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Cory Doctorow
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact - think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.
There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not.
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Cory Doctorow
Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned - it makes you *more* of a mark, not less.
Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her.
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Cory Doctorow
At least one of the board members there, @mmasnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don't agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.
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Cory Doctorow
But even the best boards can make bad calls. It was just a couple years ago that we had to picket to stop the board of the @internetsociety - where I had several dear old friends and comrades - from selling control of every .ORG domain to a shadowy hedge-fund run by mustache-twirling evil billionaires:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review
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Cory Doctorow
Bluesky lacks the *one* federated feature that is *absolutely* necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only *one* Bluesky server.
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Cory Doctorow
A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.
That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital:
https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/
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Cory Doctorow
Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this *at all*. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's *leverage* that enshittifies a service.
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Cory Doctorow
A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty - and thus worthless - server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
My publishing process is a *lot* of work and adding another service to it represents a *huge* amount of future labor:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
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Cory Doctorow
But I would *leap* into Bluesky and gladly taken on all that extra work, every day - if I knew that I couldn't get trapped there.
I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky *can* be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted.
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Cory Doctorow
My rule - I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs - is *my* Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.
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Cory Doctorow
Next weekend (November 8-10), I'll be in Tucson, AZ: I'm the Guest of Honor at the Tuscon science fiction convention:
eof/
Cory Doctorow
@bnewbold so if I had 100,000 followers on Blue sky and then I left Blue sky could I still talk to those 100,000 followers?
bryan newbold
@pluralistic it is confusing to read this because we have done basically everything you propose in the AT Protocol, and it has been live in the network for a long time now. ensuring that service migration is easy and seamless is truely seamless is literally one of the reasons we did *not* use ActivityPub.
You can read how easy the process is here:
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Migrating%20PDS%20Account%20with%20%60goat%60
On, I would mention, and independently run blogging service built on atproto! which bsky can't exclude/control
Cory Doctorow
@bnewbold In my last correspondence with the Bluesky dev team (5/14/24), they said:
> Getting another org outside of Bluesky PBC to run the Relay and Application service infra (mentioned above) in prod is the next milestone for de-risking the network.
I have been watching the announcements to see if this is done, and haven't seen anything or heard anything.
Is it the case that this is now live and functional?
Thanks.
bryan newbold
@pluralistic yes!
moreover, those 100k followers would probably not even realize you changed service providers. you can use your own domain (which you own) as a handle. the authority for your content is you, not the service provider, so all your old content (in threads, interactions) continue to just work.
Evan Prodromou
@pluralistic thanks for this great post!
Cory Doctorow
bryan newbold
@pluralistic that is still the situation: there is not a serious peer service provider operating those services in the network for the microblogging modality.
there is nothing preventing it: we support adversarial interop in the live network today, but no "adversary" has emerged.
hobbyists have run full-scale components as proofs of concept. there are fully independent apps (like smokesignals and whtwnd), and independent projects which index/store the full network (like clearsky)
Cory Doctorow
@bnewbold All right, please do let me know when that changes.
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