Thoughts on Bluesky

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> Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on.

I would like to think this is true, but there are just too many frustration stories of confusion of 'which instance' to choose, losing posts due to admins (and followers) shutting down instances and having to tell your followers where to go next.

Best part is the instance they are most likely switching to is the main instance (mastodon.social) since that is the biggest one and less likely to go down, and encourages centralization.

To solve this, they should close sign ups. Why haven't they done that yet?

To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it.

You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.

They have done everything to have the appearance of an open protocol and use that as a competitive advantage against incumbents. However, if you look at the reality, it's a very centralized service run by the same company which controls and develops the protocol.

If they are serious about this, they should hand over ATProto to an organization like W3C.

They said that they don't think ActivityPub is good enough – but why not work with the ActivityPub team to make it better instead of building their proprietary protocol? Why should we trust them?

First, let me say, I like Bluesky. A lot.

However, I also have grown to absolutely love Mastodon and its so many different communities. Whats become clear to me is, I want both, Bluesky and Mastodon.

As I've said many many times before, when it comes to free time, We like different vibes at different times. Sometimes we want a discord night, or maybe an indie movie theater, sometimes we want a drunken dance night, sometimes we want a goth club, sometimes we want a quiet night around a camp fire.

I'm super skeptical when this same set of VC people keep trying to jam all of us into the same place and they keep desperately trying to convince us "This is the only place you want to be! All of you. All at once!" its super weird. and a staggering lack of understanding of humans.

I fell in love with big cities for these exact reasons--there is always something different to do no matter what my mood is. And this is why i fell in love with the wider internet. Always something to do depending on the vibe im hunting. No i dont want to go to the same place with every single other person night after night and no i definitely dont want to hang out with people i dont like at all--thats a weird suggestion.

I want so many options depending on my mood.

At the end of the day both Bluesky and Mastodon are incredible and I dont see one "erasing" the other.

As the article suggests, ideally Bluesky will protect against the inevitable VC vampire suckification and finally actually truly decentralize.