The Rise of Bluesky
Cascade PBS
As local historian Roger Sale noted in his book Seattle, Past to Present, if cities are like trees, then Seattle is like a rhododendron, not a towering maple or oak; such sprawl and alterity may apply to Bluesky, too. Its 20 employees borrow heavily from municipal structures to understand their own function. For example, they’ve modeled decentralized content-moderation structures after the tiered system of lower and upper courts seen in the real world. Users are both consumers of Bluesky as well as its stewards, deputized through the moderation systems they develop or opt into.
Regardless of this rhetoric or intent, most people experience Bluesky as any other form of social media: a platform (an account, an app, a website), not a protocol (infrastructure for servers or many mini-Blueskies). And they’re more interested in the former than the latter, complicating efforts to shunt content-moderating responsibilities onto users. They may even be put off by the notion that content moderation should be largely self-administered, which basically puts them to work — and quite conveniently reduces moderation costs for Bluesky.
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