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?
So, again, I’ve got an impressionistic understanding.
The big central server, AFAIU, can be decentralised. How multiple such servers share data with each other, I don’t know. But, AFAIU, policy choices can be made at the level of the big central servers about what content or users they allow etc. But the idea is that moderation decisions will be made by downstream services. And the expectation of course is that the cost of running such a server would be prohibitively onerous except for a few instances. So it’d be a soft form, oligopoly like, of decentralisation you might say, if anyone actually makes one (currently there’s only the BlueSky big central server). It’s an interesting question though how small a community would be necessary to collect the wherewithal to start a new one.
Otherwise, the idea, AFAICT, is that it’s just a service and not intended to affect content and users much, which is instead up to all the downstream services which are intended to make up the actual user experience. The idea is that these layers will be open and decentralised. AFAIU, BlueSky is technically already decentralised now, under the hood, as to test things they’ve split the platform over multiple instances. I’m pretty sure their equivalent of an instance is something anyone can run (where BlueSky the app is open source). So it’s some form of decentralisation I suppose. I haven’t seen any breakdown though as to what community building facilities, tools and powers are available from the system. That’d be interesting.