Disclaimer: My views, as always, do not necessarily represent my employer. Also this is in good faith and I'm going to try to be short but I have to capture nuance and word this carefully.
To the Bluesky Social PBC:
I have a few important things to say before I say what I'm going to say:
I understand that you are people, it is difficult managing a small country worth of users. I need you to remember you purposely chose this endeavor.
Users are often annoying, bratty, entitled, and at times, threatening, scary, violent and horrific. That is what the majority of customer service people deal with on a daily basis for minimum wage. There are many more of them than there are of you.
I get stalking threats (Both in and outside of atprotocol), I've had people threaten me with legal and physical action, I've been ganged up on ON BLUESKY, by a POPULAR ATPROTOCOL DEV THAT Y'ALL GASSING UP TOO with hundreds of people in my inbox calling me a transphobic bitch who took it cross protocol to continue to harass me, go look in my account history from my reports if you're so inclined. I understand that it is hard to face that.
Who am I, and why am I saying this:
I am Head of Product Trueref a company that sells digital assets and offers a membership - I work directly in the intersection of creative and technology. I handle UX design, research, and product marketing as well. I creative direct at our company building tools and products for creatives - illustrators and comic artists mainly.
I also am founding a project for creative education, getting people from different parts of creative on board and I want to do it on atprotocol for many reasons.
Many people in my industry have had mainly negative experiences with Bluesky, from small indie creatives to influencers to large creative agencies. All criticism seems to fall on deaf ears.
It is in the utmost good faith and genuine want to see Atprotcol succeed, that I say this:
Your public behavior on the social media that you own, the features that you are making on the flagship app, are directly harming your entire project and ecosystem.
I've seen it from multiple staff members:
that one of your moderation engineers called users "rape porn defenders" with "badly drawn cartoon pfps" in response to upset about
Jay responding to a user asking about a "journalist" asking about a user 1that is actively harming and transgender people. Who I need you to understand 2are under the early stages of an active genocide.
Speaking of genocide - There are several ways you could've handled the mass banning of Palestinian accounts in a way that didn't make it look like you didn't care about genocide.
And Paul your CTO, today, 3doubling down on defending generated media despite the fact that a majority of Americans, who are the biggest users of Bluesky, don't like it.
The official Bluesky account fucking up a major promotion of other atprotocol blogging services and getting massively hatepiled.
Introducing a GenAI feature that nobody asked for and directly competes with one of the most successful companies in the atprotocol ecosystem.
I understand that technically, you don't "own" atprotocol in the traditional sense since it is a de-centralized federated protocol in which everyone is free to run their own app views and host their accounts on their own servers.
Users don't give a shit. You know this, at least knows this.
You own 95% of the ecosystem, you hold the purse strings for majority of the meet-ups, ATmoConference,regardless of the fact that you want users and devs to pick up the slack - for the time being you are everyone's mommy.
That sucks, I empathize, except I looked at levels.fyi and most of you make 8-10 times what I make, which is what most users think when they say that they should just get over genAI and it's here to stay.
4You need (especially NSFW!) content creators and devs of all types and GenAI especially scares and has directly harmed them. They're statistically more queer, POC, and overall marginalized.
From fine arts to marketing to comics to games, every creative I know has lost opportunities and been directly harmed by GenAI, their lives and voices aren't just numbers to be whisked away or scoffed at. That's food coming out people's mouths, that's medication that may be the difference between them and their organs degrading, that's standing between them an eviction. They rely on Bluesky to connect to opportunities. Most of you can just go back to silicon valley and make 200k a year or something, but many of your devs, your users, and creatives can't.
You said you are for the Public Benefit, either act like it, or don't.
You are not the first people in humanity to be in a service position and receive backlash, talk to psych ward nurses, social workers, customer service workers, sex workers. 5Who all make far less than you and do and do not have equity from the other places they worked and have far less job security than you.
The moment you started passing a hundred thousand users, you entered a covenant with your users - who are trusting you to guide and not harm them. 6Please remember, most Americans are not reading past middle school level. They're definitely not going to know what a PDS is, or de-centralization. That's not your fault, but it is your problem because that's who you are serving if you want atprotocol to grow.
You also chose to court Twitter users explicitly, who are known for being some of the least patient and vicious users on the internet. Even amongst general social media.
Non-tech people can't help you, if you can't help yourselves.
I've seen many, many creatives who have been interested in learning about atprotocol - when I've explained it to them because I've earned their trust and want to help but are quite frankly afraid and do not want to associate with you.
I want you to look at this, on Bluesky:
When I spoke about Atprotocol and a certain project I won't name explicitly because I want it to be ready before I release hoards of tech-illiterate creatives on it, people were so excited and happy. I spoke in plain terms, and I want you to look at the comments. People were explicitly happy you aren't involved.
That's not a flex, I'm not saying that to be mean. You are the entry point as of right now for most users, you will be where most devs scout users.
I'm one person, but so is every dev, every person associating themselves with Atprotocol and then Bluesky - putting themselves on the line and their reputation - professional too - to raise up this ecosystem. You owe them the respect of not posting things that are inflammatory to your userbase, one time, is a mistake, the second time is a pattern, after the third - it's becoming malicious.
Let's talk solutions
Get some PR people, make a framework for what is appropriate to post and guidelines for all staff members.
Invest in actual user research - I suggest using the Jobs to Be Done model. This is literally why I hate the confluence of UI and UX, User Experience and Product are end to end with business strategy and there are major issues with even the baseline user experience
Hire copywriters, stop relying on LLMs. A good copywriter/UX writer is worth their weight in gold, and if you have some, I don't know if they suck or you're just ignoring them. Either way it needs to be fixed.
Town Halls when you start to get back to neutral terms with users. After a few positive good will updates - you can open communication again. You could even hold specialized Town Halls for users other than devs - Small business owners, for example would be very helpful.
Common sense solutions to UX problems - Example: the Palestinian fundraiser accounts did have a person verifying them. Staff could've easily reached out to that person and created a verification labeler or even suggested the community devs to help them solve this problem. This is a PR crisis that could've been turned into a positive story.
Read a book. I'm serious. My suggestions would be When Kale and Coffee Compete (which is about JTBD and Marketing/UX) and 7The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (which is about the famous MIT Media Lab's international technology project to give open source laptops in poor countries and the monumental failure it was.)
Look to other communities doing similar work - VRchat and the VocalSynth community that immediately come to mind that even use machine learning to build and work with creatives in a non-inflammatory way that pre-date Bluesky and are still incredibly successful. (I even did a talk on the first one, hint hint.)
I'm also willing to talk, and despite my reputation on social media, I don't bite. I'm sure I could get other creatives willing to speak and open a dialogue as well.
At the end of the day we just want an internet that doesn't suck and isn't miserable to be on. This is again, made in good faith.