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.
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.
And once he has the numbers he will just sell it again
Probably true, though the protocol is open source and can federate, so potentially has a lower blast radius next time as people can just bail to other ATProto servers.
Fuck billionaires. Mastodon never had limited sign-ups because you’re not a product on it.
FOSS life!
Requires a phone number to sign up. No thanks.
Just curious, why is that a deal breaker? It seems like a mild form of anti spam protection, potential 2fa backup, and a way to uniquely identify users.
It requires personally identifying information to login. That’s a hard pass for menu people.
What I’ve long been curious about is whether the service provider can derive a subscriber identity using the number. I mean of course the mobile network operator knows I’m me, but does Bluesky? Or is it merely a valid mobile number to them?
This might have been interesting a few months ago, when they were getting the kind of free publicity that CEOs would kill for. Now that the momentum is gone, though, nobody cares. They took WAY too long to get their shit together.
