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I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:

🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.

:Fediverse: The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.

Axel Rauschmayer

@FediTips

There is one key question I haven’t yet seen answered anywhere:

“[…] our proposed methodology here of networking through Relays instead of server-to-server isn’t prescriptive. The protocol is actually explicitly designed to work both ways.”
docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-gu

QUESTION: What would that look like? Would each PDS have to crawl all relevant PDSes (=very inefficient)?

Whether or not AT Protocol can be decentralized hinges on the answer.

docs.bsky.appFederation Architecture | BlueskyThe AT Protocol is made up of a bunch of pieces that stack together. Federation means that anyone can run the parts that make up the AT Protocol themselves, such as their own server.

@rauschma

As far as I know, in the real world AT protocol servers cannot federate without being connected to relays.

There is also only one relay at the moment.

@FediTips

True! But (and I’m saying that as someone who thinks the Fediverse is the better choice):

It *sounds* like the protocol was designed to support true federation (vs. “big world” design based on Relays). What would that look like?

If that works well then, in principle, AT *could* become a reasonable and open alternative to ActivityPub.

If not (which is my current impression but I may be wrong) then there is no way of that ever happening.

@rauschma @FediTips they can say whatever they want, but since there's only one instance the current implementation is the de facto standard. Hand waving in the protocol description isn't meaningful.

@rauschma

It sounds more like a hypothetical thing in a document rather than a real world thing actually being implemented.

BlueSky are a for-profit corporation dependent on VC money, and they've given their staff shares. That gives all of them a huge financial incentive to create a network that can be bought out by billionaires etc.

It's difficult to see why they would do anything to endanger their ability to sell themselves to wealthy investors.

@FediTips It’ll be interesting to watch for sure! They made a lot of promises w.r.t. openness.

There is also this group of people: freeourfeeds.com/

It’s interesting that, per their FAQ, they want to build a second Relay. That doesn’t sound like AT will ever be truly decentralized.

It feels like they could achieve their goals with much less money if they focused on ActivityPub instead of AT.