I've been doing some research on #bluesky, nothing too deep. It piques my interest that they're trying to stand up an entire new federated protocol rather than just use (or even extend) ActivityPub. Not only does this make them incompatible with the Fediverse, it stands them in opposition to it with their own Fediverse-of-one. Remains to be seen if they'll be the VHS or the Betamax of this war.
@uniquitous @rolle being the VHS or betamax of the war means that either way, they will be rendered completely obsolete by the NEXT social networking and microblogging status update platform, too ;)
Why did they decide not to be part of the fediverse?
@RogueLodge @hakirsch @rolle A very good question. If you take them at face value, they have issues with parts of the ActivityPub standard and think they can do better. If that's true, then fair play and godspeed.
My suspicion, however, is that Jack being a billionaire techbro wants more control and/or more prestige and so he wants a protocol of his own that favors his objectives. Not sure if there are any factual grounds for that but I think distrust is the correct default response to billionaires.
@uniquitous @RogueLodge @hakirsch Here's the direct answer: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987
Yes, they want more control. I personally think portability is just an excuse. I'm not holding my breath about them allowing people to 100% install BlueSky server on their server, it's against their business model.
About the meta discussion, he's right about #Fediverse being "suspicious of Bluesky". They haven't given much reason not to be.
@rolle, thanks for sharing this link to a one paragraph summary of #Bluesky 's reason for existing.
Although I would push back that things like increased portability means LESS control, not more.
@uniquitous @RogueLodge @hakirsch
Keep in mind that there's absolutely nothing preventing ads on a ActivityPub instance or even being sent through the network.
Your instance can start showing you ads this very second if it wanted to. Heck, I could even reply to this thread with an ad :)
Bluesky is still in development. I expect that once it's ironed out there will be federating instances (or whatever they call nodes).
We will see, though.
@uniquitous @RogueLodge @hakirsch
@volkris Sure, but they stated ads will be built in. This will never be the case with Mastodon.
> Your instance can start showing you ads this very second if it wanted to.
Haha that would be very strange as I'm the sysadmin here and it's my own server. Unless my machine has a mind of its own 
(is it you HAL? Please open the pod bay doors!)
@rolle This whole twitter/mastodon/bluesky saga makes me very much into the idea that in the long run open source will win out over all else simple because its better. It might take a long, long time though.
@volkris
That is exactly why I feel conflicted about it. They don't want to invest in ActicityPub because it's limiting in many ways from their perspective (as in: less control). Yet they claim it will be decentralized (it's not, and I doubt it ever will be FULLY). But at the same time they're already said there will be ads and it will be monetized. You can't have both ways, can you? #Bluesky #Blueskysocial
@uniquitous @RogueLodge @hakirsch