I can’t talk about the others involved in BlueSky, but I think Jack Dorsey is genuniely regretful about how Twitter turned out and truthful in his intentions to make a decentralized alternative. I wouldn’t equate BlueSky with the rest of Big Tech. The XMPP creator sitting on the board and the CEO being someone who worked on Zcash, they can’t be that bad.
If they’re just a little bit better, it’s an improvement. If we have to win through salami slicing, so be it.
Federation alone would be a massive improvement already. Because it practically infinitely increases competition to do better, since there was zero before.
It’s all about setting up incentive structures so the ones in power and even the biggest assholes are compelled to do the right thing. And federation is a giant step in that direction.
Shaun Tan’s art is impressively depressing. I hate looking at it, not because it is bad or ugly, but because it perfectly illustrates everything wrong with the world. Which takes skill, I guess.