TL;DR: Bluesky isn’t feasibly federated due to hardware demands of self-hosting the relay—which would require every instance to host the same, synced copy of the entirety of Twitter everywhere—among other things, but is great at providing what its committed corporation calls a centralized “credible exit“: “if Bluesky Social PBC goes out of business or loses users’ trust, other providers can step in to provide an equivalent service using the same dataset and the same protocols”
That seems less than ideal. And yet, here we are with it being way more popular than Mastodon.
Were people really that damn confused over “which instance do I join”?
I think people dislike the experience.
For example, on Mastodon your profile discoverability is disabled in settings by default. I guess it’s needed to optimize the hosting cost, but people also like being heard. Also people don’t know who to follow since there are no algorithms or starter packs right now. And if you have a post from another instance, you need a browser extension to open it on yours. That’s the complains I saw.
As a Mastodon user, I hope we solve them!
People don’t care about decentralization as long as they have a credible exit; in fact, many may prefer the features of centralization. Bluesky also has an algorithm.
It’s not.
