This suggestion seems to be a bit different from what you implemented on piedfed. I'm having trouble articulating it though. Something more like a feed of user defined subset of subscribed communities/topics.

I've got bad news for you about cars being sold over the last 15 years.

With BlueSky, it pretends to be similar, but the reality is that everything needs to go through their central server in order to be displayed on a timeline.

They have been saying that this is an implementation detail that will change when they open up that part of their implementation. Which is nice, but until that happens I'm only lukewarm in my optimism for Bluesky and the AT protocol.

On the other hand, every federated network has converged on a central host for the vast majority of accounts and data. That host has outsized influence over the standard used on the network and unencrypted acess to the majority of data. So I'm not sure what really matters to what extent.

Thanks for clearing that up!

From a government and societal perspective, there's value in limiting anti-competative activities.

I'd like to see this experiment carried out at a sufficient scale. I feel like there would be a benefit to a gravity like component that takes density and distance into account so that people in sparsely "populated" regions aren't just effectively seeing an unprioritized feed of the entire network.

Imagine if someone who served time in prison and afterwards got their life on track had their parole deemed violated because they watched some YouTube videos at the wrong time or their location data placed them close to an event that they had no knowledge of or association with.

Yeah BlueSky has a lot of control over the network but I wouldn't say that email isn't federated because Google controls a lot of the email network.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bluesky released a personal data server implementation openly. But now that they did, it looks like the AT protocol network minimally qualifies as federated.

It will be interesting to see what Friendica devs come up with!

I've just started looking at the AT protocol. What sort of WTF things are in there?

The more I'm reading into the docs, the more convinced I am that the AT protocol is better than ActivityPub.

I wonder if there cound be a link aggregator and forum style implementation of the AT protocol, the same way that Lemmy did with the ActivityPub protocol.

I wonder what sort of bridging can be implemented between AT Protocol and ActivityPub implementations.

I get the skepticism. I'm not all that optimistic about Bluesky myself, but they clearly already made an original thing and other "techbros" have made original things many times.

The good news is this is all openly designed and implimented so it could be used for something potentially better.

It's unclear if that's temporary (But I can't imagine them manually adding self-hosted accounts forever).