Social media drama never ends, does it? It’s easy to laugh, people take a few words online so seriously! And yet in our modern society, it IS serious. Social media now wields immense power to shape the thought patterns of the culture in which it exists. It’s the medium through which people, good and bad, seek to influence and to control. So when a social network “goes bad” (as happened to Twitter/X - at least in the eyes of a section of society), that has significance.

This week, Bluesky has started to feel a little similar in some senses. The clash of “free speech” vs. moderation has become prominent, angry, vitriolic. The people behind Bluesky have reacted in ways which have left many feeling like they’re dismissed, unwelcome, unvalued.

There are already a number of articles and posts dealing with the disparity in what Bluesky claim to be doing/building and what the community that arrived (largely as refugees from Twitter/X) believed they were joining. Suffice to say that they now look a troubling distance apart, and while there is still plenty of scope for things to improve, some trust has been lost in ways which probably cannot recover.

All that is fascinating (and compelling, in a terrible way). What interests me separately however, is how to create the place that people were hoping for from Bluesky. What is it that people seem to genuinely care about? What matters and what doesn’t? How would we define what people want without succumbing to an overly technical and engineering-obsessed focus on the implementation, the promise of a perfect algorithm to solve social problems?

Here are some very loose and hasty thoughts…

No

Decentralisation - doesn’t matter. I can hear the howls, but fundamentally, most people currently don’t care. I think it would be great if they did, one day in the future, but that day is not today. Very few people joined Bluesky because of the protocol design - there are not enough of those people to sustain a small cafe, let alone a global social network.
Personalised/self-service/do-it-yourself moderation/censorship/etc. Nope. It’s an interesting and compelling technical concept, it’s full of promise, it’s a way to please all of the people all of the time if you can make it work. It’s not what people want, though. They don’t want to think about moderation or safety. They want Twitter without the Nazis. They don’t want to write their own Nazi-filter; they want that as a feature.
A protocol on which you can build almost anything. Semi-nope. It’s actually very compelling from a technical perspective; there is so much to like about some of the underlying approach and conceptual thinking, even if I have some disagreements about the implementation. But it’s not what people have been crying out for, and a social network doesn’t need to reinvent the fundamentals of social network architecture and infrastructure to succeed.
AI. Resounding nope.

Yes

User control of timelines/feeds. Users want to see a time-ordered list of posts from people they follow. They might want other things, and they should be free to opt in to those, but it’s clear that they want that. There’s a place for machine learning, for bespoke feeds, for all of those things - but fundamentally, users want to feel in control of what they’re exposed to.
Transparent, consistent, open moderation. This is incredibly hard. The hardest thing. There is no way you can just park it or expect it to emerge organically. We know enough about the behaviour of people now, you cannot wish this one away.
Money. This is almost impossible to speak about and be taken seriously. Everyone knows that people don’t want to pay for anything anymore. And yet I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to do a good enough job (particularly regarding the point above) without bringing in money from users. Not from advertisers, not from data brokers, not from anyone who wants the users to be your product. The money has to align with the wishes of the community.

Nuance

Creating a sustainable social network will not primarily be an exercise in technology/software engineering. The capabilities we have now in terms of computing and storage power make it “a thing it’s possible to build” for even relatively small organisations. Instead, it will be a journey of understanding social dynamics, of trying (and sometimes failing, with humility and honesty) at thoughtful experiments to keep a space safe and also dynamic and challenging.

It will require users to buy into it (perhaps literally, my initial gut feel is something like “free to read, follow, etc., pay to post” - a relatively nominal flat amount). It will require sustained effort in the kinds of things that techies are historically terrible at - human-centred design and understanding, social dynamics, psychology… compromise. It will probably not be an organisation where the majority of staff are engineers, but one which is far more multi-disciplinary (and one where engineers are treated respectfully but as fallible and limited and human, like everyone else).

It will require an organisation which fights for recognition and which actively tries to make itself the best possible place for people, companies, governments, etc., to communicate - both broadcasting and listening. It needs to sell itself as a meaningful channel with predictable and reasonable behaviour. It needs to allow for challenge and debate, but clamp down hard on dehumanising and violent behaviour. It needs to show that it values truth and honesty.

I actually believe such a thing is possible. I think it becomes more possible every day, as more and more people realise that any social network where they are not a genuine stakeholder with a voice is at risk of rotting underneath them. How many people would pay, say, £1/€1/$1 a month to be part of a global conversation with standards and decency? It feels like that number is fast becoming a viable target market.