I appreciated these comments from Dave Winer about/against Bluesky’s having needlessly reinvented many wheels when it comes to web technologies in its pursuit of whatever. I’m not a Bluesky user, but this is absolutely an epidemic disease I’ve seen working as a product manager these past few years in crypto/blockchain…

BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don’t do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don’t deprecate. They’re still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is “Let’s not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop.” People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you’re a developer you don’t understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don’t reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn’t be having this friction.

On the crypto side, for all the talk of decentralization, what I’ve seen is that the vasy majority of those projects just end up leaning on AWS in the end. That, of course, and a lot of needlessly complex architecture for rewards that are not always things people need or want. But no, I’m not cynical…

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