One thing I don't understand is how can Bluesky pretend to be more open than Twitter when it's been months and it's still an invite-only closed garden?
Well, for one you can download all data on the network (posts, likes, follows, ...) using a free public API, even in real-time. If you want to try Bluesky without an invite code, you can run your own PDS (personal data server) today and federate with the official sandbox network, there are already 100 servers doing that: https://atscan.net/pds
You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance
Like moving from GitHub to GitLab.
Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.
> You can download and keep your data and keep a backup
> and you can keep a copy of your data
Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.
That specifically is not the selling point, but it is how one of the selling points works.
You can just take your data to another instance whenever you don’t agree with the policies of your current one. And all your connections/interactions/data should stay intact.
If it works as well as it seems to in the federation sandbox, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’re using a different service, the app just sends requests to a different server, and the web url may be different, and your default feeds are generated somewhere else.
Now, you may say that users won’t care about backing up their data, but that can be solved with some open (or paid) archival services.
As far as I know, It's not decentralised at all at the moment.
But do you have more info on this wiping data and removing people claim? All I've seen is people pissy because someone wasn't banned for something rather minor.
Well, it's still under a massive amount of development. Most basic features aren't there. Such as I can't change my email I used when I signed up. This is an issue for people since I typo'd it when I signed up. You can't change your password, you can create new app passwords. Since these are super basic features, it kinda shows how all the other stuff are.
Realistically, I don't think it could handle a full enslaught of new users and wants to onboard slowly which makes sense from a development point of view. The issue is, it's basically dead or just full of shitposts. Which has no real value.
And the number of people who want on it aren't actually that high, I've got 3 invites and no one to invite.