Where Does Power Consolidate on Bluesky?

In a matter of weeks, millions of X (formerly Twitter) users moved out of Elon Musk's dark cave and sought the ‘blue sky,’ writes Nathalie Van Raemdonck. Since the US election and the appointment of Elon Musk to a position advising President-elect Trump, users have been faced with a fait accompli that the X platform will be a propaganda tool for the incoming president and his far-right politics. But where does power consolidate in Bluesky, the decentralized network that has emerged as a favored alternative to X?

Much has already been written about the demise of X (formerly Twitter) and the increase in hate speech, misinformation, and manipulation by its leadership. As academic Robert Gehl writes, X is basically equivalent to Truth Social now. Other competitors, such as Mark Zuckerberg's Threads, tried to catch waves of emigrating social media users, even though the platform’s algorithms mostly foster engagement bait. Many also flocked to the decentralized fediverse in 2022, where the Twitter analog Mastodon caught a wave of users traumatized by authoritarian Silicon Valley leadership. Users of the Fediverse, however, argued over how they did not want to be the new Twitter replacement, as there is a strong preference for ‘local vibes’ and decentralization as opposed to ‘big world’ social media.

None of these replacements were as successful in providing an accessible and familiar alternative to X as Bluesky appears to be. However, the central question that should be on everyone's lips is, where is the locus of power in Bluesky?

Bluesky and corporate takeover

The biggest headache when considering the future of Bluesky is how a repetition of a Musk-like takeover scenario can be avoided. Tech critic Cory Doctorow recently questioned how Bluesky is armed against “enshittification,” a term he invented to describe the process that all Big Tech platforms seem to go through to satisfy their need to make money and deliver a return to investors. One day, the bills for server costs and developers will somehow need to be paid. Those who put up the capital might also be able to bend the platform to their will. So, Doctorow asks, how can we be certain we will not be trapped and held hostage again on this platform after investing the time in developing a social graph? The developers of the platform know this themselves; their motto is that the company itself could become the platform’s future enemy. That's why it's built with a decentralized protocol, unlike the walled gardens Big Tech has built over the past decade. We need to dive into some technical explanation to fully understand what makes Bluesky different and how there is still power consolidation, despite best intentions.

In decentralized networks, the idea is that users can continue to communicate with each other regardless of what platform they are on and what server their data is stored on. To that end, Bluesky, the company, developed the ATprotocol, which is the basis of the ‘ATmosphere.’ In the ATmosphere, different applications can be built, such as the Bluesky platform. In practice, Bluesky is currently the only prominent platform, despite there being some interesting development projects, but technically anyone could create a new application, and even copy Bluesky's code, given that it is open source.

When it comes to the decentralization of servers, currently, new accounts on Bluesky are automatically stored on a Bluesky server, and moving away requires some technical skills and small payments for server space, but it is not impossible. To understand how this combination of accounts and platforms works in practice, I draw from an explanation journalist Laurens Hof made on the conceptual model of the ATmosphere. All accounts in the ATmosphere are a bit like websites, with Bluesky as the platform serving as the indexer, just as Google is the indexer of the Web. The websites you see in your search results exist independently of Google, and so do the accounts in the ATmosphere. We have other search engines like Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, but people prefer the indexer that they find most user-friendly or yields the best results.

If there were cause to migrate, people could move away from Bluesky as their main indexer, but many might not because of convenience or lack of technical skills. This would mean if people like Cory Doctorow moved away within the ATmosphere, their network would still be subjugated to whatever future Bluesky has up its sleeve, which can impact the communication of those networks. So while in theory, the system is much more open and resilient to central control than X, in practice, individuals are still required to move away from the platform and servers in droves, which makes it difficult to change course. Thus, there is a prospective threat to collectives that also deserves attention.

A middleware solution to speech

How Bluesky can be influential as an “indexer” and threaten such networks is similar to how Google chooses which websites to show and how to rank search results. The Bluesky developers conceived their model of the ATmosphere in such a way that “speech” and “reach” would operate on two different layers, giving users a choice over the second in terms of what content could reach them personally. This leads to a libertarian interpretation of free speech, which TechDirt founder Mike Masnick advocated for in his seminal ‘protocols not platforms’ essay, which heavily inspired the development of Bluesky. The kind of logic where the user decides what kind of ‘awful but lawful’ speech they want to see was dubbed the ‘middleware solution’ by a Stanford group led by political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Actions against the ‘speech’ layer are limited to illegal content, such as images of child abuse. These would be removed by Bluesky from its servers and app.

Regarding the reach layer, Bluesky developed an innovative decentralized approach to maintain its libertarian management of free speech, which is composed of at least three parts. The first is stacked moderation. Bluesky has a team of labelers whose job is mainly to “label” content that might be harmful but lawful. Currently, there are labels like “rude,” “discriminatory,” “misinformation,” or “sexual content,” but also labels like “self-harm” and “illegal goods” exist. Users can choose whether they want to see labeled content, see it only with a warning label, or hide it completely in their app. This means Bluesky retains the power to label, but users have the individual power to not enforce these labels. This means it is quite possible for two people to follow the exact same people but not see the same posts. Other users can also create such a labeler and have people report to this specific labeler. This complements Bluesky's built-in labeling, bringing decentralization within the platform.

The second way Bluesky shapes “reach” differently is through what they call ‘the marketplace of algorithms.’ This allows users to develop their own algorithmic feeds in Bluesky. Other users can subscribe to such feeds and thus control their own timelines; for example, one can choose to only see the ‘quiet posters’ they follow, see the content of their mutuals that gained the most traction first, or only see people posting in Spanish.

The third way is moderation lists, where users can create lists of people they prefer not to see or even prefer to block. Other users can also subscribe to those lists, and new additions to that list are automatically muted or blocked by subscribers as well. This creates the possibility that people who end up on such a list become invisible to large groups of list followers who may or may not be aware of everyone on that list. As journalist Charles Arthur describes, some former X users have already decried being added to heavily subscribed blocklists based on wild or speculatory accusations.

From the combination of these user-governed moderation layers, entire architecturally delineated communities can emerge on the platform, as is the case for BlackSky. User and developer Rudy Fraser developed a combination of feeds, labeling, and moderation lists that was named BlackSky, a ‘place’ in the ATmosphere where Black people could find each other without becoming a target for people with bad intentions. The idea was not to create a segregated corner for Black people but to ensure that people could see each other in a crowded room and know that they were not alone. Minority groups are often more affected by online harassment and count as the canary in the coal mine that more quickly senses that something is wrong in our public spaces. It makes sense, then, that BlackSky would be a forerunner in testing out how Bluesky offers protection.

When it comes to power decentralization, it is clear that users get a lot of choices, but these choices are all still contained within the Bluesky platform. Lists and feeds can also be reported to Bluesky who can take them down. It is also clear that certain users have a lot of power over what content others can see. Anyone who subscribes to a feed, labeling, or moderation list is dependent on the choices and also whims of its administrator. That administrator thus becomes a de facto norms leader. In theory, anyone has the ability to create a competing feed, labeler, or moderation list, but there is a first-mover advantage where people stick with the first one that’s gained prominence. In practice, one also needs some basic technical knowledge to set it up and energy to maintain it. Power always thus concentrates somewhere in certain leaders, even in decentralized systems.

Call-out culture vs mute culture

When it comes to social dynamics, Bluesky clearly differs from X in several ways, especially in how users deal with people who break their social norms. On X, a call-out culture (also pejoratively called “cancel culture”) emerged in part because of the platform's architecture. The platform's openness lets content reach many different corners of the internet, leading more often to what researcher danah boyd coined context collapse. This means people constantly come into contact with other people who have different social norms, often leading to conflict and possibly public reprimanding, a “call-out.” This is often accompanied by what researcher Alice Marwick describes as morally motivated networked harassment, a way of silencing people by rallying troops that enforce their perspective of ‘right norms.’ The alternative proposed by Bluesky is to make people with whom one clashes invisible to themselves and possibly others in their network. This is what the ‘freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom of reach’ approach is about.

Is either system “better”? and if so, better for whom? People who disproportionately face online harassment may be able to better protect themselves on Bluesky. At the same time, Bluesky’s atomized moderation may also ostracize those who want to have difficult but necessary conversations about, say, racism or genocide in Gaza (topics that would likely not lead to such muting on Bluesky at the moment as researchers found that the platform currently has a predominantly center-left population). Polarizing voices can become invisible in a public sphere that would rather not be confronted with them, even if political polarization is sometimes needed to enact change.

Of course, not ‘seeing’ certain actors might also fend off affective polarization, as some research shows the trenches of partisanship are often deepened by interacting or merely seeing opposing views. Yet as Diana Mutz writes, it is important for democratic systems that there are still opportunities to reach across the aisles. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe calls her ideal model of public deliberation “agonistic” as opposed to “antagonistic,” where citizens can have political confrontations to come to a “conflictual consensus” on society.

Whether large, open, many-to-many platforms like X and Bluesky are the right space for this is food for discussion. However, it’s certain that the decentralization of Bluesky does not just apply to technology but extends into communities. As academic Christina Dunbar-Hester already observed in different decentralized networks like Mastodon, there is a certain loss of “collective conversation.” Due to what she terms “lossy distribution,” a shared reality can fragment if some participants in a discussion are hidden from some other participants.

In conclusion, Bluesky is more resilient to a hostile takeover than current Big Tech social media platforms. There is, as ActivityPub co-founder Christine Lemmer-Webber calls it, a ‘credible exit’ within the ATmosphere if leadership changes. Power, however, consolidates in the ATmosphere with Bluesky, both in the company and in certain users. This can both make for healthier social interactions and potentially fragment the public sphere at the whims of certain powerful users. Only time will tell how well the emergency exits work and in what ways Bluesky will become the new online “town square."