Technology

“It’s no accident that US political operatives have been singling out Bluesky as a target for political control and retribution for months.” But the result puts protocol developers and the users of their networks in opposition.

22 Oct 2025 — 1 min read

[Erin Kissane]

Erin Kissane has written a great overview of why the current administration’s recent arrival on Bluesky is a turning point for the open social web:

“The containment of mass-scale social media by the authoritarian-friendly billionaire class is just about complete: TikTok is coming under the control of billionaire friends of the Trump administration, X is led by the the same billionaire who took a wrecking ball to vital government services, and Meta is run by another billionaire with a miserable record on human rights and misinformation. Open social networks—like those running on Bluesky’s AT Protocol or the Activity Pub protocol that powers Mastodon—are the only remaining leak in their information-containment fields.”

And as Erin points out, it’s becoming the network of choice for academics, journalists, writers, and other culture creators. In other words, even though the network is small, it’s disproportionately influential. It makes sense that, in turn, anyone seeking to control public opinion would seek to influence it.

As I pointed out in my FediForum keynote, an open protocol in itself doesn’t make anything inherently safer. It’s true that it removes the central point of control — Bluesky the corporation doesn’t control all of Bluesky the network — but an open network can still be surveilled and influenced. Because Bluesky is a more cohesive network (broadly, everyone can reach everyone, regardless of where their profile is stored), it’s susceptible to influence campaigns.

Does that matter to a company that’s hard at work building a protocol for which the Bluesky product is more or less a proof of concept?

I like the term high-context moderation that Erin uses here. Bluesky the company is moderating its network, but it’s only policing based on actual use of the platform, rather than taking into consideration activity outside of it. The implication is that David Duke could show up and hang out on Bluesky as long as he behaves himself. That’s at odds with what many users need in order to feel safe. They want high-context moderation; Bluesky wants to police what is done on its own servers. That’s going to put open protocol developers into direct opposition with the actual consumers of the protocols.

It’s a great piece. You can read the whole thing here.

[Link]