It’s amazing how quickly the FreeOurFeeds thing dropped out of the discourse, but I guess there’s a log going on these days. Even so, spending thirty million dollars to somehow “force” Bluesky interoperate with a copy of itself while people are out there today, right now, connecting Commodore64s, AA-powered PalmPilots, aquarium pumps and toothbrushes to the Fediverse is definitely an entire idea.
The argument is basically that “with your support we can increase the number of BlueSky servers from one to two. As long as they stand very still, don’t change anything and also let it happen. All of these are reasonable things to believe will definitely occur. And if we’re successful, then anyone who can spare a few million dollars in staff and infrastructure costs will be able to run a third, maybe even a fourth server.”
It’s frustrating because of how many times we’ve seen this play over the last 30 years, all while refusing to learn anything. Mono, Slack, every twitter client, all the people heroically struggling to resuscitate email and rss, ad-supported operating systems and all the dead-greenhouse walled gardens, all of this is trying to teach us the same lessons.
Watching PixelFed team blow past their Kickstarter goal of 1.66% of $30M, saying “Our entire team is absolutely overwhelmed by your incredible support”, the idea of throwing some uncountable amount of money, effort and time into the proprietary bonfire believing something will grow from the ashes seems ridiculous. And calling that “creating an ecosystem”… no. Just no.
We have more important things to build.