Nobody Cares About Your Protocol

This is something that has been swirling in my head for a few months now and it all came to a boil when Threads started celebrating its birthday this week 🙄

Anyways........a few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg's superyacht showed up in Seattle. My socials lit up. "Wealth inequality!" "Billionaires playing with boats while the rest of us split rent!" "Meta recently did layoffs in the area!" The discourse was loud, righteous, and honestly, fair.

It was also happening on.........drums please.......Threads!!!. A Mark Zuckerberg owned company.

Sit with that for a second. Thousands of people, genuinely upset about one man's concentration of wealth and power, choosing to voice that frustration on a platform that feeds that exact man's wealth and power. Every post, every reply, every angry quote, all engagement metrics for Meta. Didn't anyone notice the irony?. Or worse, they noticed and simply didn't care.

And that's when it really landed for me: the concept of an open social ecosystem is not resonating with most people. AT ALL.

The numbers don't lie (unfortunately)

I'm a Bluesky guy. I love it there. I was there when it was invite only, when the app icon was just generic clouds, when it opened to everyone. Each new change: GIFS!, Video!, Hashtags!! celebrated and applauded. But let's be honest about where things stand. Threads is past 400 million monthly users and recently passed Twitter in daily mobile users. Bluesky? Around 45 million total accounts, and per Similarweb, daily active usage has actually declined year over year. People sign up during some big moment of platform drama, poke around for a week, and drift back. Below is one of the most recent usage metrics:

Meanwhile, most Threads users are already living inside Meta's ecosystem. The majority of its daily users are also on Facebook or Instagram. Threads didn't win an argument. It didn't have to. It was just there, one tap away, pre-loaded with your Instagram follows. Convenience beat conviction, the way it almost always does.

And here's the uncomfortable truth:

Nobody joins a social network because of its architecture.

We ~ the people who care about this stuff ~ keep leading with "decentralized," "open protocol," "you own your data," "AT Protocol lets you take your identity anywhere." And regular people hear: blah blah blah, are my people there? No? Okay bye 👋🏾

People join social networks for people. For memes. For the drama, the sports takes, the parasocial chaos. Decentralization solves an ownership problem. It does absolutely nothing for the attention problem. And most folks have never once felt the ownership problem in their body the way they feel a boring feed. You can't feel a protocol. You can feel an empty or irrelevant timeline.

So people will complain about billionaires on a billionaire's app forever, because the complaining is the entertainment, and the entertainment is where their friends are. The hypocrisy isn't a bug in human behavior. It IS human behavior.

Okay, so I'm frustrated. But I'm not hopeless.

Because here's the flip side nobody talks about: Bluesky punches way above its weight where it matters. Publishers keep reporting that their small Bluesky audiences drive better engagement and more referral traffic than their giant Threads followings. And I believe this is partly because Threads actively deprioritizes links (Adam Mosseri has said so out loud). During big live moments, like election nights, championship games, Bluesky engagement spikes hard, because people show up expecting real conversation to be happening.

Smaller, but realer. That's not nothing. That's actually the seed of everything.

The problem isn't the product's soul. It's the pitch and the friction.

So what would actually bring people over?

Some ideas, in rough order of how much I believe in them:

1. Stop selling the protocol. Sell the experience. "Decentralized social built on AT Protocol" is a pitch for developers. "Your feed, your rules, no algorithm deciding what you see, no ads wedged between your friends" is a pitch for humans. Bluesky's best features (custom feeds, stackable moderation, chronological timelines) are genuinely better experiences, but they're marketed like a whitepaper. Lead with the feeling, not the infrastructure.
2. Raise the character limit to 500. This sounds small. It isn't. Threads gives you ~500 characters, with a newer feature that allows you to post long form up to 10,000 characters; Bluesky caps you at 300. That gap changes how people write. It kills the cross-poster's workflow (your Threads post needs surgery before it fits on Bluesky), and it strangles exactly the kind of thing Bluesky is best at: substantive, thoughtful conversation. If your community's whole identity is "depth over virality," why are you the platform with the tightest ceiling? 500 characters says: we want your actual thoughts, not just your one-liners. I've posted a GitHub idea on this a while ago, which now contains a lot of great comments from other users: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/2551#issuecomment-3102836086
3. Fix the empty-room problem on day one. Starter Packs are genuinely one of the best onboarding inventions in social media, and they're buried. The first 10 minutes on Bluesky should feel like walking into a party where someone immediately introduces you to five people you'd actually like. Right now it can feel like walking into a warehouse with the lights half on.
4. Give people a reason, not a lecture. Guilt has never moved a user base. "You shouldn't support Meta" converts nobody. Im guilty of doing this of this as well. "Live sports conversation actually pops off here" converts people. "Journalists post their real analysis here first" converts people. The pitch has to be additive, not moralistic.

Where I land

The open social web isn't failing because the idea is wrong. It's failing because we keep asking people to care about plumbing. Nobody switched to Gmail because of IMAP. They switched because it was better and you were getting a ton of free storage (at the time).

Bluesky doesn't need to convert people to an ideology. It needs to be so obviously, feel-it-in-your-thumbs better that the openness becomes a bonus people discover later. The "wait, I can just take my followers with me?" moment that turns a casual user into a believer.

The masses aren't coming for the protocol. Fine. Let's build the thing they'd come for anyway, and let the protocol be the reason they never have to leave. Thoughts? Comments?