Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.

The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.

The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.

The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

This is also my take and I feel like we've seen this play out enough times to see where it's going. The protocol seems to allow decentralization, but that hasn't happened enough to protect against enshitification. If bsky decided to disconnect their main instance from the others, most bsky users wouldn't even notice, but third-party instances would likely implode.

The happy developer relations is to encourage people to develop on top of this "open" platform, but it's hard to imagine that's not just growth hacking.

Why not build on top of protocols that are actually open and will still have decentralized usage in a decade?

> The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.

Here is one of many sites that help users de-risk, backup, and migrate: https://pdsmoover.com/