What pcorda is describing is actually the premise of Bluesky, which is why it was initially funded through grants and established as a Public Benefit Corporation. The logic has been to find the appropriate hybrid of commercial and non-commercial interest which will support the work.
The initial team came from a bunch of activist projects (typically p2p) and the thing we concluded was that activism requires a theory of change. How is your new technology going to get adopted across the world? The software world still largely operates by markets. Startups are the vehicle for distribution. So we need to behave like a startup while still accomplishing the technical/mission work.
The incredible gift was the initial funding and awareness, which Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for^1. That gave us about 10 months to do protocol work prior to commercialization, which was less than we wanted but just enough to get it done.
ActivityPub deserves a lot of credit too for its progress under an entirely different model, which I tend to describe as communitarian. What both projects did correctly was connect the protocol to an initial application that drives that distribution. Whether either get to "mass" adoption (greater than centralized services) is now the big question.
^1 Apologies for teeing up the inevitable "Dorsey left" conversations.
The initial team came from a bunch of activist projects (typically p2p) and the thing we concluded was that activism requires a theory of change. How is your new technology going to get adopted across the world? The software world still largely operates by markets. Startups are the vehicle for distribution. So we need to behave like a startup while still accomplishing the technical/mission work.
The incredible gift was the initial funding and awareness, which Dorsey deserves a lot of credit for^1. That gave us about 10 months to do protocol work prior to commercialization, which was less than we wanted but just enough to get it done.
ActivityPub deserves a lot of credit too for its progress under an entirely different model, which I tend to describe as communitarian. What both projects did correctly was connect the protocol to an initial application that drives that distribution. Whether either get to "mass" adoption (greater than centralized services) is now the big question.
^1 Apologies for teeing up the inevitable "Dorsey left" conversations.