What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects? Say what you want about wanting to avoid politically disagreeable people, but Bluesky has been shrinking gradually since the 2024 election, as people interested in political effectiveness or even avoiding a hugbox have drifted away. Or think about how new projects are generally not started as GPL anymore (except if they want to charge money by making their open source version AGPL), due to similar viral dynamics discouraging potential contributors.

“Shrinking since the election”, while technically true, is misleading because the election is when bsky experienced a massive spike in usage that was well over double the average before the election. Usage has been gradually decaying since then to a steady level much higher than it was before the election.

If you zoom out to a few years you can see the same pattern over and over at different scales — big exodus event from Twitter followed by flattening out at level that is lower than the spike but higher than the steady state before the spike. At this point it would make sense to say this is just how Bluesky grows.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Besides that, the entire point of this project is to increase the barrier to entry for potential contributors (while ideally giving good new people a way in). So I really don’t think they’re worried about this problem.

The project author has the choice of which set of projects vouches to use or to have a project-specific vouching system. People could still object to the vouch system via Issue/Pull-request Tool and off platform. Enough votes would highlight it.

>What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects?

Perhaps that is the plan?