Their most valid criticism of Bluesky is essentially that they don't understand it (they quite clearly haven't tried it, but feel validated in sharing their opinion anyways).

I'll share two reasons why Mastodon is not "the Only Good Choice", as someone who hosted multiple Pleroma instances for myself and others, for years.

- Where do you sign up? The fact that if anyone asks this question for Mastodon, they are almost certainly not directed to a sign up page is far more friction than most people are able to allocate effort to overcome. I went out of my way to host instances so I could have an obvious answer to this question. This is far more friction than the average person would be able to allocate in order to have access to an obvious answer to this question.

- Conversations are simply broken. If you communicate at all in a decentralized way, you will interact with threads where you do not see whole branches of the conversation. Not even due to defederation, just because the branch hasn't naturally federated to your instance. This is not a good social experience.

I encourage people to not accept the articles shallow claims that Bluesky is not decentralized and that it would fail if the company behind it did. Just because Bluesky actually works does not mean it is backed by centralized infrastructure. The data is decentralized, and that is what matters.

> Where do you sign up?

This is such a problem for any federated platform; there really isn't an obvious front door. And I'm sure there is some principled theology behind why this shouldn't be the case but ultimately I think there should be a front door somewhere - even if the front door leads you to the most blandest instance around.

>they

Don't misgender Tim Bray.

> Their most valid criticism of Bluesky is essentially that they don't understand it (they quite clearly haven't tried it, but feel validated in sharing their opinion anyways).

https://bsky.app/profile/tbray.org

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:zcjwxwfgk756to5cl52crfue

My feelings ever time this comes up on HN lately

(-_- )╯ vim vs emacs

( ^_^)σ AP vs AT

The truth is that both AP and AT made steps in the right direction but also contain fundamental flaws. The next protocol will hopefully draw on both but make permissioning first class and core.

There's no money in online brands anymore anyway. Who cares if Bluesky, or any other platform, goes south? Just move on to the next thing. Have 2 things at once. Don't use any thing. These platforms don't own you.