In the early 1980s, I worked at a ComputerLand store, ostensibly to teach an introductory BASIC class on Apple IIs on Saturday mornings.1 In the afternoon, I was tasked with keeping the keeners distracted while potentially more profitable prospects were tackled by the leisure-suited, wide-tied, smoke-at-their-desk sales staff. I was always shocked and dismayed at how little these folks had to know in order to sell a significant setup with a hefty price tag. A passing knowledge of VisiCalc, apparently, was about all that was absolutely necessary.

Of course, in my youthful arrogance, what I failed to realise was that both the sales people and their customers were laser-focused on just one thing: what the computer could do of concrete benefit, rather than what it was, in the abstract. As a recovering computer hobbyist back then, it was my first brutal lesson in selling the benefit, not the feature. It was true in that cluttered little ComputerLand, and it’s still true today. In fact, it’s the most important lesson I have ever learned, at least so far as my professional life is concerned.

This foundational understanding, hard-earned such a long time ago, was the first thing that came to mind recently when I read Bluesky Interim-CEO Toni Schneider’s About the Atmosphere,2 just his fourth published blog post since assuming the role in early March.

Oh no. He’s selling the feature, not the benefit of Bluesky, said the tiny, crazed voice in my head. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and not in a good way. Given his background in the venture capital world, I had assumed his board-anointed appointment was intended to quickly pivot Bluesky from the esoteric and abstract to more concrete concerns, such as helping Bluesky survive.

Apparently not.

In the article Toni extols, at considerable length and detail, the benefits of the AT Protocol, otherwise known as atproto. It’s the plumbing that creates a standard format for user identity, follows, and data on social apps, allowing apps to interoperate and users to move across them freely3 on which Bluesky was built and now depends. Even with my woefully atrophied software development skills, I still understand enough about this sentence to know it’s really important, and the future it potentially unlocks really is bold, brilliant, and beautiful.

But in our techy excitement, let us not forget that relative to all Bluesky users, the subset who are atproto developers is a vanishingly small number, and will remain so indefinitely. Here’s the problem with putting atproto front and centre with all the other legions of Bluesky users, both new and elder:

Nobody gives a damn.

The inability of Bluesky to capitalise on the repeated mass, fiery exoduses from Twitter (on principle, I eschew the name X) has to rate as one of the most underreported business stories of the recent past. Out of a highly improbable confluence of high-profile events in the realm of politics, societal trends, and technology, so much was serendipitously aligned for potential success, taking candy from a baby looked like quantum mechanics by comparison. Before there was even time to put a shingle up, new, fresh-faced Bluesky users showed up in droves.

Then, these precious newcomers mysteriously vanished almost as quickly as they arrived.

Many of them wound up back on Twitter, like nothing had ever happened. Given the magnitude and multitude of mortal sins committed over there, this is just really hard for me to fathom, or accept. Don’t you people know how to hold a grudge? If you do, it sure would have come in handy back then.

Going forward, it is vital to thoroughly understand either what was done—or not done—during these periods in response to the incoming, repeated tsunamis of users primed, ready, and willing to set up shop on Bluesky and permanently dump Twitter.

Top of the list of potential explanations for the subsequent bizarre and unfortunate turn of events was talking about atproto. There, I said it. Even a little bit was way too much. But there it was, right at the top of the marquee, given above-the-title billing.

At some point in the brilliant atproto-enabled future, some user who doesn’t know the difference between a protocol and a hole in the ground will appreciate being able to surf from one app to another without having to log in again and again. Another user will be delighted when, in a fit of pique over some minor slight, they’re able to exit Bluesky for some other platform and discover they can take all their stuff with them. Cool.

All that said, I am certain the travel time from here to there will be measured in years for the overwhelming majority of Bluesky users. For now, they have much more weighty matters to which to attend, like posting pictures of cute little kitties, or pizza, or airplanes, and have lots of people ❤️ or 🔁 them.

Reminiscent of the VisiCalc vignette from the 1980s, future Bluesky users won’t know—or give a damn—that they have atproto to thank in part for these benefits. They will only know that they can do what they always expected social media should be able to do in the first place. Like vacuuming, loading the dishwasher, or doing the laundry, no one should really expect much in the way of appreciation for doing what is, in fact, your job.

Any sort of discussion of atproto, or the fediverse, or whatever other arcane, jargony concept floating around Bluesky should never have been part of the welcome package. The best time to act on this notion would have been back then, before the tsunamis crashed on the Bluesky beach.

That notwidthstanding, the second best time is now.

Having had a stab at identifying the primary culprit for Bluesky’s current near-death experience, it’s only fair to identify things that should have been undertaken back then—and certainly undertaken starting right now—to provide the best shot at survival and, dare I dream, Bluesky’s ascendant success over the longer term.

At the top of the list would have been to trumpet Bluesky users’ ability to take control of their algorithm.4 The transparency of Bluesky’s approach to this should not only have been given that coveted star billing, but it should also have been supported by a variety of programs—both technical and educational—to make it point-and-click child’s play to determine what shows up in your feed. At best, the murky world that determines so much of what you see on social media is creepy. At its worst, it enables and automates humanity’s darkest impulses with potentialy civilisation-destroying consequences. I’m no student of Sun Tzu, but isn’t one of his primary theses focusing as much energy on the adversary’s greatest weakness? The black-box, profit-obsessed algorithms are that weakness, folks, and everybody knows it.

Second, despite the inescapable knowledge that the blue check mark rollout on Twitter had been a legendary fiasco, it stunned me that Bluesky basically chose to imitate it. Even more confounding, Bluesky already had a great verification system in place: that is, enabling users to use their internet domain name for their Bluesky handle. Setting this up is a simple, five-minute job.5 However, it does require you to own, or at least have privileges on the domain in question. That’s a small detail, but a big obstacle to those who would pretend to be that which they are not. We all trust the Domain Name System (DNS) with just about everything else in our online lives, so why not this? Also, as an alternative to the labour-intensive, seemingly capricious and arbitrary blue check mark, how about simple bronze, silver and gold check marks based on the quantity, quality and transparency of attributes of the DNS entry to which the account is linked?

Finally, functionality and funding—tons of it—should have been dedicated to capturing and keeping key corporate, institutional, and personal accounts that would have brought with them their built-in audiences interested in keeping in touch with them. That is, once they were no longer on Twitter, which also needed to be part of the initiative. In the future, I visualise this as an upbeat, business-oriented, nuts-and-bolts, human-to-human pitch to social media departments about Bluesky helping them achieve their desired social media and therefore business outcomes, which it can do better than any other social platform. This would include helping them understand why Twitter is actually working against them in this regard. This full-court press will be labour-intensive and expensive. Good thing Bluesky won’t be wasting any more time or money on blue check marks. It will also require some strategic thinking on which accounts to focus intensive campaigns. Paging Ms. T. Swift and paging LEGO, for an important message.

I could go on and on and on, but that’s likely enough damage done for now.

I’ll cop to it. I love going to the Apple Store. I don’t really need to go because I already have almost every gadget they sell, even if it’s not the absolute most recent version in each case. I simply like to stroll through, under the bright lights illuminating the enduring, Jobsian minimalism, and listen to the youthful buzz.

Recently, I realised I go to the Apple Store for another reason. There’s a through line, so fine only I can spot it, between what’s going on there and that ComputerLand I worked at so many years ago. To test this thesis, I sometimes think about channeling my inner shit-disturber and asking one of the Geniuses about their thoughts on whether Darwin was a good choice as the underpinning of macOS. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they have a flying squad with the prime directive of politely inching troublemakers of this ilk to the floor-to-ceiling front door, while somehow making them feel good about it.

I’ve never done this, of course, because of the unmuttered and smiling ‘stupid old man’ it would justifiably engender. I would argue with this assessment if I could. Of course, I then realise, like everybody else in the Apple Store, I’m only there because I want to know what time it is, add up a column of numbers, and take a picture.

One I will post on Bluesky, of course.

Terence C. Gannon is Founder and President of Intellog Inc., a firm engaged in digital content creation, social media marketing, and digital project development. He is currently seconded to the aviation-oriented publication BluFly as their Managing Editor. Terence would love to hear from you about The Prodigal Protocol; here's where you can leave your comments on Bluesky.