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.
Yeah it must take a ton of work to make function properly but at the same time, I also think it isn’t unreasonable to doubt that a for-profit entity is ever going to willingly open up their system.
Why wouldn’t they just keep coming up with excuses for why it hasn’t been implemented yet? There is no real genuine promise here like there would be if the federation system was implemented from the start (even if it was janky) and every day that goes by the likelihood that federation/decentralization will ever happen on Bluesky becomes less and less likely.
This reminds me of an early access game selling itself on a vision of what the game will become while clearly having very little intention of ever getting there. They spend a lot of time talking about all the great features they will add like NPCs and quests but are they actually ever going to tackle the tough problems of implementing those features? Or are they just going to focus on selling character and weapon skins through loot boxes?
All good points.