Bluesky is a PBLLC which pretty severely limits the rights of their investors.
A good example of what this means in practice is developer awards from Bluesky Social. As I understand it, once Bluesky PBC starts making some profit they are planning to begin placing something akin to bounties on successful app projects within the protocol. I believe Graber called this "Coopetition" at some point, where developers are "competing" within the ecosystem but simultaneously working together to make the protocol's foundation stronger.
This is something that a PBC structure makes immeasurably easier to do. Why? Because the company has more responsibilities than simply returning profit to shareholders. The shareholders can't simply sue the company or oust Graber because of this, since Bluesky Social also has a legal responsibility to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation". Please do get read on what it actually means to be a PBC.
Ok, so it's even more vague than how I understood it. This could mean anything.
Venture capital does not care about profits, they just care about selling their share at a considerably higher price than they bought it within ~ 7 years. In reality, most of the time, this happens through an acquisition. Many times this happens without the acquired company making a single cent of profit.
So how does it matter that Bluesky Social is a PBC in this context? It is still owned and controlled by shareholders, many of them venture capitalists. It can still be sold at an uncapped profit to the share holders.
Look at what happened at OpenAI, and that was structured as a non-profit...
> a public benefit corporation shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
There is no language about committing a percentage of profits to a cause.
"The Certificate of Incorporation of a benefit corporation commits the company to spending some of its profits or resources (or both) in support of a specific public benefit. If a benefit corporation decides to stop doing business and dissolves, the shareholders receive the proceeds of the sales of assets, after liabilities are paid." (from https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/non-profit-corporation-vs-p...)
What I'm saying is that very likely Bluesky will grow for a few years without making a cent of profit, and be acquired by another company. And this has not much to do with if they are a PBC or LLC or whatever...
This kind of stuff.
> very likely Bluesky will grow for a few years without making a cent of profit, and be acquired by another company.
Or this bit.
It's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. I see things differently. I just mean I'm not trying to convince you of that stuff.
We don't know what Bluesky Social PBC has committed to in their certificate of incorporation.
For a B-corp if the investors sue the board or CEO for breaching fiduciary duty for not maximizing profit, the response is "we were following the mission (and you knew we would be following the mission going in), GFY"
This is not black and white. And to be honest, it is telling that you throw this statement into the room. Of course, there are also organization / people who have more weight in saying into which direction standards like ActivityPub should be developed, but this is a far cry from the protocol roadmap being owned by a single for-profit company.
> I realized that any activist effort needs a theory of change. For a software technology, that’s the market. We need to make better products if we want our technological goal to succeed.
I agree, and Bluesky is obviously a great product. It is very likely that building on a truely decentralized protocol like ActivityPub has too many drawbacks to build a mass product in today's world. This is beside the point, though.
> The model we follow is more federal more than confederal. We use strong leadership that can be replaced
It can be replaced in almost the same way as you are replacing Twitter. Or any service can be replaced by another. At best, ATProto is a glorified import / export feature in this context.
Your work history has nothing to do with Bluesky's future. Bluesky is not owned by you, and while you currently might have some say, as soon as the VC ROI pressure starts building, nobody will care.
To be clear, I don't doubt your personal intentions. But it is very naive to believe that a protocol developed by a for-profit company that has just taken in $ 23 million is somehow incentivized to build a network for the good of the people first and not for their own profit. And don't tell me that those two are the same thing or aligned somehow, please.
I just would like to know this: How you can say that Bluesky is decentralized while the reality is that all your 20 million users sit on the same service run by the company behind Bluesky. And no, the ability to self-host your own data does not equate to being decentralized.
PS: I will read up on those topics you mentioned.