people who think bluesky is federated are fascinating
came across a guy who refuses to use mastodon but thinks ATproto will outlive bsky.social because you can just host your own if the management are doing things you don't like.
This would be like bsky and not like masto because of reasons
like the only ATproto project with any momentum is blacksky, and as far as I know that's less about federation and more about the moderation tools it gives them to deal with posts from bsky.social, given there & frankly everywhere else's inability to or lack of interest in moderating racists
other than that there's the not-tiktok that died after the US ended up not banning tiktok, and I think someone's trying to make peertube work with it?

@Nerts The term "federated" doesn't apply to ATproto, that's not how it works.

But Blacksky does go beyond moderation, they also run their own Relay. This gives them the potential to avoid/mitigate censorship by Bluesky's owners, and does theoretically mean they could continue operating even if Bluesky folded.

The core issue ATproto presents for meaningful decentralisation is that running a Relay is extremely resource intensive. Whereas ActivityPub is very accessible for self-hosting.

@Misofist @Nerts

Excellent point. Check out this exceptional essay from @lrhodes:

https://destructured.net/federated-mediated-networks

Federated and mediated networks

Lately, I’ve seen several people argue that Bluesky is a fediverse network, on the premise that interoperability between independently-run instances is enough to qualify. I think that misses som...

destructured

@mastodonmigration @Nerts @lrhodes Good article.

My own understanding was originally informed by this article by Christine Lemmer-Webber:

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Although I have also been loosely following more recent developments to bsky since the publication of this article. (e.g. Blacksky's Relay wasn't out back then)

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

@Misofist @Nerts @lrhodes

Yes. Christina is the foundation, and really like L.Rhodes introduction of the 'mediated' terminology to characterize the difference. You might also be interested in this thread which attempts to distill some of Christina's points into a more general explanation:

https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116122817979484928