The nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already fo

The nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already for example. These protocols should compete on merit. There's no good fundamental reason for them to not federate each other's content. But there are lots of non technical reasons. For example mastodon users particularly are quite picky about how their content is filtered and used. Even implementing a search engine is something that gets a lot of pushback. The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see. Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.