Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, decentralised social networks and the very common crowd

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has been interviewed in Pirate Wires by Mike Solana about social media and why he left the Bluesky social network site and the Bluesky company board. [Pirate Wires, archive]

Solana works at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, so Pirate Wires is the sort of reactionary twaddle you would expect from such a background. The “culture” section, goodness me.

Dorsey got Bluesky started, originally as the reference implementation for a distributed protocol to serve as a new backend for Twitter. He supplied a pile of cash and hired the original team.

The thing that really upset Dorsey: Bluesky users demanded moderation and Bluesky put it into place. Yeah, that was the whole issue.

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Ordinary users who want to talk to their friends and make new friends don’t like wading through poop. A social network’s product is its content moderation.

Dorsey took care to hire on for the Bluesky staff a collection of LessWrong rationalists, neoreactionaries, VibeCamp anti-wokeist race scientists and crypto developers. And Bluesky still had to asymptotically approach a tolerable degree of moderation and — eventually, despite the CEO and several devs being followers of the test case offender — ban the Nazis.

There is not a single mention in that Dorsey interview of what the real-world market of people who want to socially interact might want from a site that exists for social interaction. There are only Dorsey’s hypothetical ideas for a perfectly spherical social network in a vacuum.

Actual users have long just not wanted what Jack is selling here.

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The Pirate Wires interview talks a lot about uncensorable, truly decentralised protocols — but somehow fails at any point to mention Mastodon or ActivityPub. The network commonly called “Mastodon” or the “Fediverse” has a few large nodes, but it also has thousands of smaller and personal nodes and three independent major lines of software (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey and their forks) implementing most of the shared protocol. You can just put up a server and join in.

The Mastodon network has millions of users. Its structure makes it unlikely to replace Twitter for a user base in the billions — the decentralisation means that so much of it just isn’t and can’t be a smooth experience.

But Mastodon is also unlikely to go away. It’s run by the sort of people who have opinions on Linux distributions. When Twitter and Bluesky suffered rolling overloads in 2023, Mastodon kept ticking along. True decentralisation is robust.

Despite its genuine decentralisation, Mastodon has also implemented a server covenant that does a pretty good job of excluding the far-right extremists by a purely social process — if you keep horrible arseholes on your server, you’re liable to be shunned. [Mastodon]

This has led to a “dark” Fediverse of sites that don’t go along with the covenant but still talk to each other. Gab is such a site, for example.

If you want untrammelled free speech social networks, they’re right there, right now!

For some reason, neither Pirate Wires nor Dorsey are interested in these existing real-world examples.

This is because these guys only care about their assumed right to force people who aren’t interested to listen. “Free speech” is when they can say awful stuff and you can’t answer back. When Dorsey calls Twitter — Twitter! — “freedom technology,” that’s the freedom he means. They can’t live without unwilling ears to bash.