Bluesky is in a jam because there’s only one instance. They have an architecture for more instances, but now that we’ve gotten a look at what federation is like in practice with Mastodon and ActivityPub, I don’t look forward to the same idea around Bluesky. Which is where the bind is, because that means that Bluesky, like Twitter and Facebook, would have to take on moderation and will get a lot of grief if they don’t do it to people’s liking. I wrote: “I don’t think they or anyone else can afford to stand against abuse on the web, it’s diseconomic. People don’t pay for the service, and there’s an infinite supply of abuse. You know how when they add a new lane to a freeway thinking it’ll ease traffic but doesn’t? imho it’s the same kind of thing. I do think there’s hope for small social nets with dozens or maybe hundreds of users, and let Facebook have the monster social nets, they more or less have found a way to make moderation pay. I’ve written about this idea a lot, filed under the phrase fractional horsepower.”#