Bluesky may have the juice, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid

Any marketing guru with a Substack and a Udemy course will tell you that your brand should have a mission and an enemy; make your customer the hero, and you play the role of sherpa. I know this not only because I'm a marketer (derogatory) but also because I live and breathe.

We humans are drawn to the good vs evil narrative. It's the hero's journey. It's thirty-four MCU movies, all with essentially the same fucking plot. My reader in Christ, it's the Bible. So, I come to you, on this giving of thanks, as a marketer (sorry) and as a human person, to say— that the fight for a better web isn't a war of good and evil. It's so much more boring than that. Just because you left the bad place (X) doesn't mean you arrived at the good place.

Bluesky, for now at least, is just a place. It's run by fallible, corruptible people, just like every other social media company ever to exist. If we are to make Bluesky the “good place,” well, I don't have all the answers, but I know we should start by keeping a fire under the Bluesky team's asses; that, instead of our lips.

Just because the Bluesky team is friendly, writes in Internet slang, and doesn't repost race crime statistics, it doesn't necessarily make them the good guys-- I mean, I'm sure they are good guys (non-gendered), but this isn't a superhero movie. The war of competing interests isn't two platoons charging at each other from opposite ends of a desolate plain (sorry, I'm watching End Game while writing this).

On the web (and in life), we all want to be a part of something that isn't on fire. Our hope-starved souls are desperately seeking something to be happy about. For now, for many, for better or worse, that something is Bluesky. I totally get it. I just wish we were all a little more skeptical. We don't owe techno-libertarianism anything, least of all our blind allegiance.

And let's be clear (Obama voice)—Bluesky's vision for the new “social internet” is very much a libertarian worldview that is as old as the commercial web itself. Going back to the early days of eBay, technocrats have been trying to pawn off the labor of running a digital community onto its community members. What they'll never admit to, though, is that the digital spaces we spend our time in are rarely communities. They're markets.

Communities cultivate. Markets extract. Cultivators make decisions based on what is best for the community. Extractors make the number go up. Communities can have markets, of course. But when markets run the community, we end up with the Internet we have today. Markets had their shot and they fucked it up. It's time we brought back the virtual community.

So, is Bluesky a community or a market? It's hard to say. It's too early to tell. But I do know that people with power tend to do exactly what we allow them to do. That goes double for people who've convinced us they have no power at all.