Enter Bluesky, which remains the most interesting experiment in social media. It has recently both opened up federation, but even more interestingly it has abstracted out the moderation layer (along with open sourcing tooling for people to use). This means that anyone can provide moderation services, and users can pick who they want to moderate their experience.

It may be difficult to wrap your head around how this works and why this matters, but I’m going to try to break it down with this article.

Yes, you can say that I’m biased. A little over four years ago, Jack Dorsey announced that he was going to fund a little project called Bluesky to build a decentralized and open social media protocol, based in part on my Protocols, Not Platforms paper.