Today I post somewhere else, if I can.

Last weekend I took a look at an old-but-new social network.

I fell like a fly into Bluesky's alternative world.

When the platform launched, I signed up straight away, but I didn't see much traction. It was supposed to be a new Twitter, but then it lost its way. Bluesky (which, incidentally, was partly in an old password of mine) emerged in the wake of some troubling posts by our friend Elon Musk on X.com (formerly Twitter).

It had everything, yet something was always missing. Only a few social networks manage to capture that kind of attention. TikTok comes to mind (it's the only new medium that deserves an article about gaming addiction).

What was missing then, and still is today? A rhetorical question with an equally rhetorical answer: the network of people you've built relationships with over the years. Right? That's also the moat (a word LLMs use all the time) that keeps people from leaving a social network.

One day, you get hacked or something happens and you're locked out.

With no way to recover your account.

That day can come for anyone. So I started exploring Bluesky.social and discovered a federated universe, like others that haven't taken off. Fortunately, choosing a federation is a separate matter and doesn't get in the way. You can have your own identity either way. But what intrigued me most as a senior dev was that:

• You can build feeds (your own custom algorithm).
• You can build agents and bots.
• You can build clients.
• You can build apps.
• You can become a host (a federation).

The best and most interesting part is this: you can do all of this with an existing user base.

You can find me on my two accounts:

• giorgionetg.bsky.social (private, but public. American by birth).
• giorgiotedesco.eurosky.social (professional & European).

And finally, the app I use:

• Pckt.Blog is where my drafts end up when they don't get published on this site.

See you around. Have a good day!