I'd like to see what the metrics for the Fediverse would look like if it included federated Threads users.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Yeah, but bluesky has users.
I'm pretty happy with engagement in the Fediverse.
Exactly.
Communities are not higher quality with a million people. Small communities where you can know who the other posters are are a much better experience.
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So does Reddit but you presumably see some value in federated platforms yea?
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Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there's a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
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Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It's basic enshittification theory.
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
portable identity
So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
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... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
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For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
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