Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance

Social media faces a crisis of trust over the management of speech, with critics simultaneously arguing platforms remove too much and too little. Middleware, a recent market-oriented proposal for platform governance, promises a way out of the impasse through third-party services for curation and content moderation. While large commercial actors like Meta and ByteDance have shown little interest in fostering competition, the situation is different for newer, more decentralized platforms. We approached Bluesky, which has substantial infrastructural support for third-party services, as a critical case to assess the potential of middleware in practice, investigating the implementation and capitalization of editorial services on the platform. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyzed the uptake of Bluesky’s primary tools for curation (feeds, starter packs) and moderation (moderation lists, labels). On the supply side, we found evidence of significant interest, especially for curatorial services catering to online subcultures and left-leaning Bluesky users. Yet evidence of user demand was quite minimal, with low rates of adoption not indicative of a thriving marketplace. Our analysis offers mixed lessons for the future of middleware: if it is meant to function as a conventional market, substantial developments in monetization are necessary. If it is to be supported by diverse kinds of capital, the community infrastructure needed to support these endeavors is notoriously difficult to scale. Middleware as a marketplace of editorial services is thus not only a policy solution, but also a cultural contestation over the values of platform governance.