The following is a publication of the essay I send out to the newsletter subscribers last Friday. It is a follow up on last week’s article about growth narratives. If you want to get these essays directly in your mailbox every Friday, sign up now, its free!
This week I wrote an article outlining how the era where Bluesky and Mastodon grow as a result of people leaving X in response to actions by Elon Musk is over. Musk then illustrated that point by turning X’s chatbot into MechaHitler the very next day, which indeed did not result in any measurable increase in signups for either platform. In this week’s ATmosphere Report I also noted that I find it striking that this also does not seem to have an impact on the AI Safety and AI Alignment communities on X. Bluesky provides much more space to build with AI, while xAI’s treatment of Grok is strongly unaligned with the ethos of the AI Alignment community.
A common explanation for why people don’t migrate from Big Tech platforms to the new social networks combines two factors: a lack of knowledge and a collective action problem. Regarding a lack of knowledge is the thinking that people would abandon X for Bluesky or Mastodon if they understood the fundamental design differences that prevent X’s problems from occurring. There is also a broad recognition that the primary challenge is collective action, as users only migrate when a critical mass of their connections moves with them.
Underneath that is a sense that people on decentralised social networks understand how these networks solve some of the problems of the centralised Big Tech platforms, while the people who are using the Big Tech platforms are not aware of that. And if we could share this knowledge, as well as finding a way to overcome the collective action problem, people would join the new social networks in much larger numbers. But what matters is not so much what the design of platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon are, but what people perceive the affordances of the platform to be. This week’s reactions to Bluesky’s UK age verification announcement illustrate how users of both Bluesky and Mastodon are not always aware on the affordances of their own platform, or how they interact with the legal system.
Bluesky announced this Thursday that they’ll implement an age verification system for the UK in order to comply with the UK’s new Online Safety Act. Bluesky’s implementation is fairly minimal: if UK users do not verify their age they can still use the app, only DMs and adult content is hidden. Furthermore, the age verification will be implemented only into Bluesky’s own client app. UK users that want to use DMs or view adult content on Bluesky without handing over personal data can simply download any other 3rd party Bluesky client and continue using the platform as normal.
How ATProto works, and why Bluesky implementing an age verification system only impacts their own app and not other 3rd party clients, is not something that seems to be well understood by a large number of Bluesky users. The large majority of reactions express frustrations with both UK legislation and Bluesky’s decision to comply with this law. That people in the UK have an easy to use the Bluesky network without dealing with the age verification system does not seem to be well-known, and only comes up within the ATProto developer cluster.
Over on Mastodon, a popular thread discussing Bluesky’s compliance with UK’s age verification also focuses almost exclusively on the problems with the law, and the advantages on Mastodon’s culture. Only one comment out of the hundred or so asks the question: ‘but do Mastodon servers not also have to comply with OSA’?
To me this points to the challenge with the new social web: social networks build on open protocols function much more differently than people expect. Even the people who use these new networks do not always seem to fully grasp the implications. For Bluesky users that means treating the platform as if it functions like any of the Big Tech social networks, not being aware of the freedoms that are afforded to them by separating application from the protocol.
Mastodon users on the other hand seem to assume that Mastodon servers are so different from Big Tech social networks that they exist outside of the regulatory landscape altogether. The federated model of each server being a small independent entity, often owned by volunteers, can give the impression of being outside of traditional governance. Laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act do not make this distinction however, and apply to any social platform.
This illustrates that there is still a lot to gain in building a wider understanding of what the new social networks are, and how they function. This goes both for the communities on the Big Tech platforms, as much as for people already using the new social networks themselves.
