I feel like I may be missing something when it comes to BlueSky, or maybe both I and those trying it out are but in different ways. My understanding is that BlueSky is currently like the Mastodon Social instance is for Mastodon but of the AT Protocol under development, with the long term aim being that once their protocol is sufficiently developed to their liking, they’ll put out the version capable of federation for others to spin up their own instances with.
However, once they do that, won’t it basically create some of the same problems people already have with ActivityPub, i.e. instance choice, federation confusion, etc.?
What’s supposed to set it apart and address existing issues rather than reinvent things and add their own distinct issues?
I’m personally not convinced bluesky will ever be truly decentralised.
I suspect the reason they have delayed implementing federation for so long is to get as many users on their centralised service, and the big central server will be used to impose their choice of censorship. Even if you can theoretically run your own master server, if 99.9% of users only use bluesky’s it’s meaningless.
I do agree that defederation is the biggest issue holding the fediverse model back, however. It makes choosing a server overly complex.
Not a bad take on BlueSky. The other funny side of it is that many of the users there don’t want any federation to happen at all.
It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time. By all accounts they have a small team and are generally making slow progress, and if they see themselves as competing with Twitter, they probably think it needs to work well straight out of the gate.