erasmus

The ATProto (the federation protocol on which Bluesky is built) may inadvertently worsen online discourse through bad commercial incentives.

In a federated system where users can easily switch platforms with their social graphs intact, platforms will compete for users/eyeballs by optimising for engagement rather than quality content. The outcome may be that "responsible" platforms that moderate well become small, irrelevant echo chambers, while platforms that embrace sensational, low-quality content grow rapidly and dominate public discourse.

For the Bitcoiners, there's the nano-paywall from https://satoshipay.io/ . (I'm part of the team working on this). We're currently trying to integrate fiat payments too, which would make this a browser wallet of sorts that can be used to pay micro-amounts to publishers. Still early days, but think we're on to something with a lot of potential.

Micropayments have been the holy grail online for which everybody from the core web protocols working groups, to IBM to Ted Nelson's project Xanadu have been searching. It's a tricky one to solve, but with the emergence of cryptocurrency tech, there seems to be new hope.

I'm currently involved with a project called SatoshiPay (https://satoshipay.io/), which tries to solve just this headache by enabling micropayments (down to fractions of cents) from a Bitcoin wallet that's created automatically straight in the browser. Still early days, but I believe this could be a user-friendly solution to the micropayment problem.