Not really federated so far, right? They talk a lot about being open, but (when) will they be really? Can I sign up for an account that intereacts with Bluesky through any other provider?
I mean, I signed up, it seems interesting enough. If nothing else it has some recognizable accounts to follow, better network effect than Mastodon.
According to a random employee on hacker news, later this month they will have open federation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39274882
As always, caveat lector.
There is some federation, however most instances that I’ve seen are people’s personal instances because in the past you’ve still needed a bluesky invite to federate with the main instance. Now that you don’t need an invite anymore I’m sure that’ll change and you’ll see more public 3rd party instances popping up.
I don’t follow it very closely, but as far as I know, they are the only one implementing the open protocol they designed (which doesn’t interoperate with ActivityPub). However, there seems to be some efforts for creating a bridge: https://www.docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed
As you said, there are some recognizable faces and that may impact the adoption. But not being compatible with ActivityPub is a real bummer.
