In case you missed it, Bluesky is apparently caving to an authoritarian government:

[ksaj@infosec.exchange]

@FediTips Wow, can anybody follow the laws of every country all at the same time?

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@ksaj

For-profit corporations generally try to because they don't want to lose market share (though they may lobby to change laws of course). That's why online services from large corporations may vary a lot depending on where you are accessing them from.

Independent servers aren't worried about market share.

[bgmckay@mastodon.world]

@FediTips I have seen other reports that it is the Turkish gvmt shutting down servers that BlueSky was using. Not BlueSky doing the censoring.
I do not know which is more correct.

[lemgandi@mastodon.social]

@FediTips As Cory Doctorow says "A great party in a locked room."

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@BGMcKay

Bluesky has blocked it in Turkey, people are confirming this with VPNs:

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114348113927295764

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@lemgandi

It won't be a great party for long if it is centralised

[Gæst]

@FediTips
A lot of what I've heard about Bluesky is that "it's like Twitter used to be!"

I don't think anyone who says that as a positive remembers how bad Twitter was about this kind of thing even before Musk bought it. At the absolute very least, everyone knows how everything turned out.

If there's anything we can learn from that, Trump's reelection, and COVID, it's that large groups of people can't seem to make decisions based on anything beyond a year or two ago. I'm not sure how to account for that to make any meaningful change.

[toxomat@social.tchncs.de]

@FediTips
Not sure how big the audience of "huh, didn't notice until now" is, but yes, blsky is neither free nor decentralized.
@briankrebs

[Gæst]

@FediTips

No one controls the Fediverse

Not exactly - each instance admin controls their instance, and as such the experience of their users. That’s a critical difference for two reasons

1. It means you can join an instance that you jive with, and don’t have to “put up with” things you don’t like.

2. It means that in order for the Fediverse to continue to have diverse information and viewpoints, people need to avoid congregating on a few large instances.

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@alatartheblue

Yeah, totally agree, to put it exactly: no single person or organisation controls the entire Fediverse. The power is decentralised to thousands of independent instance admins who all control a tiny bit of the network

But the character limit is unforgiving on vanilla Mastodon so I tried to say something briefer

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@toxomat

I've seen a lot of people who still think Bluesky is decentralised, because that's how Bluesky hypes itself in interviews and media promotion. The media then perpetuates this for whatever reason.

[feditips@social.growyourown.services]

@jargoggles

Yup.

Also, people seem to think corporate structures can be okay if only the people in charge are good people. This is similar to the "benevolent dictator" fallacy, it totally misses that the main problem is with the structure rather than who is in charge.

If people could think about the effects of structures more, real change could be possible.