Yeah lots of the commenting online seems in somewhat bad faith about this. I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), an

Yeah lots of the commenting online seems in somewhat bad faith about this. I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community. Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things. Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour. Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway. Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.