I feel like I may be missing something when it comes to BlueSky, or maybe both I and those trying it out are but in different ways. My understanding is that BlueSky is currently like the Mastodon Social instance is for Mastodon but of the AT Protocol under development, with the long term aim being that once their protocol is sufficiently developed to their liking, they’ll put out the version capable of federation for others to spin up their own instances with.
However, once they do that, won’t it basically create some of the same problems people already have with ActivityPub, i.e. instance choice, federation confusion, etc.?
What’s supposed to set it apart and address existing issues rather than reinvent things and add their own distinct issues?
At this point BlueSky had better make free liquor and hot BBQ come out of your computer if they want people to adopt it. I could be wrong, it could be real attractive, but I feel like there’s so much momentum built around ActivityPub that they’re by now fated to abandon AT for ActivityPub whether they want to or not, or else go the way of CompuServe.
In my experience, the Twitter refugees that know how to install Linux are on the Fediverse and the Twitter refugees that don’t are on Bluesky. The ones that tried to sell crypto a some point seem to have switched to Nostr.
I don’t think Bluesky cares that much about federation, they’re open to the concept ut it’s not at the core of their product like ActivityPub is with most Fediverse servers. If nobody sets up an alternative federated server with more than 100 people, Bluesky will be just fine, whereas the Fediverse would pretty much die if there was just mastodon.social and nothing else.