Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can’t run your own server yet. We’ll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you’re not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They took crypto bros VC money.
Do we really think they’ll allow mass federation without getting returns on their investment?
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.
They’ve followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I’d perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
