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.
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.
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.
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.
