Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.

I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.

A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.

That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.

I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn't necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.

Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).

The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, you're contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it's the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.

Their federation doesn't work the same as Lemmy & Mastodon there's no federation to individual servers.

If Bluesky introduced ads to their app, you can take all Bluesky data from the relay and host your own app without ads. This is working today and easy to do.

If they started charging for access to the relay you can host your own relay and it will parse all users data for you to use. This is also working today but it's a little expensive.

Something would have to SIGNIFICANTLY change with the protocol for Bluesky to change how the relay interacts with the PDS, that would require such a large infrastructure change there's no reason even questioning further.

The reason you don't see anyone doing it right now is because there's not much incentive to. On Lemmy we're each on our own little "community" but Bluesky is just here's everyones data no matter what when hosting a relay.

That's a fair point. If you're concerned about people judging you, you probably wouldn't want to be seen as a Fuckerburg fanboy.

It's hardly some technological marvel that could never have been achieved on a less centralized protocol

My one complaint about fediverse is I have half a dozen baronvonj@ accounts in order to get the features and UI experience of each. They are all separate, with the data for each spread out, and we all have to redundantly follow on each. If I could have one fediverse identity with all my data self-hosted, that would be the awesomesauce. But I can't with fedi and I can with AT.

Regarding the alleged missing features of ActivityPub

There are significant differences in account portability. ActivityPub allows you to transfer your followers to a new server, but not your content.

• The real user names (DIDs) are cryptic codes that are kept hidden most of the time, with your visible user name redirecting towards it. This gives the illusion that user names can be changed/transported, and that users are not locked down to one platform.
• Content is filtered rather than censored, so that a big monopolistic actor can allow bigots on their platform but keep them out of sight of regular users. Had Bluesky been an ActivityPub hub, it could easily end up being perceived as a nazi bar. This is a benefit for Bluesky who do not want to be responsible for moderating their platform.

They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That's how on Bluesky, there's an understanding that the removal of hate speech "conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals". On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.

I guess this didn't really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.

Right... isn't the obvious response to this "holy shit, they really don't have a business model even remotely figured out here???" which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of "sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions".

This isn't difficult, it is just exhausting.

What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has....

Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can't stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.