It’s a federated protocol, but the network itself isn’t meaningfully federated, and is basically just Bluesky (the company) infrastructure. Hopefully that changes, because until then, it’s still a centralised social media platform, despite the underlying technology
They have no reason to change that. They will long term want the exact same thing that twitter has, access to all user data and control of the platform.
Rumors are indicating that they want to offer some subscriptions to users(domain registration and hosting of various bluesky components).
The company is currently TINY, under 50 employees. So as long as the infra costs stay low, it won’t take much. If enough users get vanity domains, and they get some govt/enterprise accounts for hosting bsky.cnn.com and such.
So the idea is that they want to get to some ethical monetization strategy before releasing the software to aggregate content is released, and federation is enabled.