Erin Kissane has written an insightful post on Bluesky’s closed beta, and more importantly the response from the Mastodon community. In particular, the passage below had me violently nodding in agreement.
One of the big things I’ve come to believe in my couple of decades working on internet stuff is that great product design is always holistic: Always working in relation to a whole system of interconnected parts, never concerned only with atomic decisions. And this perspective just straight-up cannot emerge from a piecemeal, GitHub-issues approach to fixing problems. This is the main reason it’s vanishingly rare to see good product design in open source.
— Erin Kissane, Blue skies over Mastodon
The whole post is well worth your time to read.