Wasn't Bluesky developed in house by a paid team at Twitter, who also developed the protocol? And isn't its UX essentially a clone of Twitter's, which itself is the result of millions of dollars in R&D and proprietary labor? And isn't the existing familiarity with Twitter the only reason Bluesky's interface is "intuitive?"

A lot of the rough edges for Mastodon come from it actually being decentralized, and the extra complexity that brings. There is for all intents and purposes only one Bluesky instance, and there will likely only ever be one instance due to network effects. It's open source in the same way Reddit or HN are open source - the code is available, but there is only one implementation that matters.

I don't think you're entirely wrong - Mastodon could definitely do with better UX, but let's not pretend the playing field is level here. Bluesky's success is very much the result of corporate and proprietary development culture, advertising and startup hype, not of open source culture.

There's one Bluesky appview and so far one public relay run by Bluesky.[0] There are over 1000 independent AT protocol instances and numerous independent appviews.

[0] Technically two if you count the development site.

[0a] New appview just dropped and it's Discord https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3lbfdkqinl22z

HN is not open source. Only the base software package is, the 'secret sauce' is proprietary.

Don't know why you're being downvoted, every point is bang on.