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First of all, before I say anything else, my goal here is NOT to be mean to Bluesky's devs. I know there's a lot of fediverse-Bluesky rivalry, but I have enormous respect for Jay Graber and her team and I know they believe in their vision!

This started because I got some very kind encouragement by @bnewbold to write something. I'm trying to be technical in my analysis, not unkind. I hope that can be recognized, really and truly.

That said, let's get to the summary: Bluesky / ATProto are not decentralized or federated, according to my analysis.

However, the "credible exit" goal is worth perusing, and does use decentralization techniques! But it is not decentralization/federation without moving the goalposts on those terms.

Furthermore, I think Bluesky is providing something valuable: a lot of people are trying to leave X-Twitter *right now* because it has become a completely toxic place.

The fact that Bluesky's team has managed to scale to receive such users is incredible, nearly feeling miraculous.

On the fediverse we also see a lot of accusations of Bluesky being owned by Jack Dorsey, and this isn't true. My understanding is that Jay performed an impressive amount of negotiation to allow Bluesky to receive funding independently.

These days Jack Dorsey is instead focusing on Nostr, which I can only describe as "a sequel to Secure Scuttlebutt with extremely bad vibes where bitcoin people talk about bitcoin"

I participated a bit in the process of when Bluesky was Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal's personal project. I also believe Jack and Parag were sincere about Bluesky as a decentralized social network protocol that Twitter would adopt, which is the directive that Bluesky was given as an organization.

When Jay Graber was awarded the position to lead Bluesky, I was not surprised. To me, Jay was the obvious choice to deliver what Bluesky was being directed, and I do think Jay is an excellent leader

There is also something which Bluesky gets right which the fediverse does not. I mentioned that Bluesky uses decentralization *techniques*, and the most important of those is content-addressing. This allows content to exist even when a server goes down.

This is a great decision and I have advocated that the fediverse do so as well. In fact several years ago I wrote a demo in @spritely's early days showing off how one could build a content-addressed ActivityPub in a spec-compatible way.

@cwebber @spritely

For the chronically curious: are there publicly available details about the AP demo you’re referencing here?