Hot take: Bluesky is good, actually
I'm warming to Bluesky more than I expected. I still prefer Mastodon, but there's a lot of exasperating misinformation (which I'm sure is mostly sincere) about Bluesky over here. It's also open source. It's also built on an open protocol. It has arguably better moderation tools, and it does some interesting things with the notion of algorithmic timelines by letting users construct the algorithms. Yes, being backed by VCs is problematic. But let's not pretend that Mastodon’s BDFL-driven model is without its own set of issues—if there's anything more popular among Mastodon partisans than railing against Bluesky, it's railing against Gargron. And let's also not pretend that there's absolutely no downside to letting instances break their users' social graphs through defederation—that all such cases are as cut-and-dried as "don't federate with nazis, racists and TERFs.”
re: Hot take: Bluesky is good, actually
@arilin then the whole "open source" and "open protocol" thing is kinda moot innit
re: Hot take: Bluesky is good, actually
@noiob No, I don't think it is moot. It's important that there *could* be other servers, because it means that Bluesky isn't a locked-down silo that's guaranteed to die when/if its original developers go under, lose interest, turn evil, whatever. It still *could* die then, like many other open source projects, particularly ones that come out of for-profit companies, have over the years. But it's not guaranteed to. And people are already using the open protocol aspect, of course, for third-party clients, scripts, bridges, etc.
re: Hot take: Bluesky is good, actually
@noiob I doubt it. :) My impression is that they didn’t actually plan to run their own server at all except as a test, then Twitter set itself on fire and they switched gears and launched way before they planned, so they’ve ended up as a centralized platform. I think they’re sincere about wanting to make it decentralized, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually gonna happen.