"There are all these things which work on Bluesky like like counts despite it being decentralized."
That is because it's not actually decentralized. Also, I think not federating the like counts is more of a *Mastodon issue* than a *fediverse issue*.
Mastodon could do it but it wouldn't be efficient to do so.
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Of course, Bluesky can do it more efficiently, they can do it more efficiently because they are mostly centralized.
