Chris Holdgraf:
My guiding principle for using BlueSky (or any platform or SaaS product for that matter) is to assume that it will go away in three years. It’ll either go bankrupt, get bought, or change its strategy to enshittify the product. You can make an argument that BlueSky has some technical protections against this [..] but I think the heuristic above is still the right one to follow.
So I’m going to try treating BlueSky as a temporary place to make connections or share ideas, but do my best to direct attention, deeper thoughts, “real” value to places that I have more control over.
I’ve been banging the own your identity drum for a long time now and this post contains a lot of sensible suggestions. The ultimate in owning you content and identity is self-hosting but this post contains suggestions that don’t require that level of complexity.
In other words: don’t build your castle in a kingdom that somebody else controls, because they can take it away from you. Instead, build a castle on defensible land, and leverage platforms to bring more ideas, people, value, etc to your castle.
This is similar to the IndieWeb POSSE concept: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. See also micro.blog.
Rather than treating BlueSky content as persistent (and thus referenceable in things like blog posts or papers), I’ll try rendering conversations into a static form before including them in my writing.
This is a good point, I almost got bit by this with my self-hosted Pleroma instance when it came time to retire it. I was able to work around it by creating a static archive of my content.
Rather than sharing BlueSky links in “learn more about me” slides etc, I’ll lead with links to my website.
Not that I do slides very often, but a short personal domain (wezm.net) has
turned out handy for this.
Not everything needs to be persistent over long timelines!
This is the pragmatic choice, but I think people are far too willing to break links on the internet. With a bit of care, redirects and static archives can keep links up for years to come.