With Bluesky’s announcement that they’ve taken another round of money from venture capital, there’s speculation about how enshittification will set in and destroy the platform.
In principle, I’d prefer non-commercial social media. When Twitter collapsed, I moved to Mastodon. Their log line is there is no algorithm. What they mean by that is that my timeline is displayed in a big mushpot of posts by people I follow, with the most recent posts first.
Of course, that is an algorithm. The intended contrast, however, is with opaque algorithms like the ones used at Twitter and Facebook. Those services show you posts in some mysterious order, often suppressing ones that you’d like to see and promoting ones by people who have paid them money. Mastodon’s algorithm doesn’t do that.
Nevertheless, Mastodon’s algorithm still kind of sucks. Posts from frequent-posters inevitably dominate. It doesn’t collapse threads, so someone who has a long blog post show up as 100 toots creates a long smear in my timeline.1
Bluesky’s solution is to have multiple algorithms. I can view everything organized by recency. But I can also click the Quiet Posters tab to display recent posts from accounts that don’t post as often. I don’t know exactly how that algorithm works, but the gist of it is clear.
Bluesky also has a Discover tab, which is even more opaque. It shows me stuff that from people I’m following but also, I think, stuff that’s liked by people I’m following. Maybe? It’s a grab bag, but discovery is good. When I find someone cool, I can follow them. Then they start to show up in the other queues.
Contra the Mastodon ethos, algorithms are good. The queue of messages will look different when it’s organized for showing me everything, for filtering out frequent posters, or for letting me discover things I didn’t explicitly request. All of those are outcomes I want some of the time. The problem with opaque algorithms is that they’re opaque (and built to maximize profit of the platform) not that they’re algorithms.
The danger now is that Bluesky will lose that functionality as they chase miraculous profits.