[CuriousCosmic]

> which I still don't understand the purpose of when the internet's already kinda settled on Mastodon/ActivityPub as the go-to for decentralized social media

The things bluesky wants to do well really just don't map well onto ActivityPub.

Things like:

- Custom feed providers - Custom indexers/firehoses - Labellers (i.e. content filtering/flagging services) - Proper, cross-instance moderation services - Separating identity from the instance

> DMs not part of the AT protocol?

Currently the AT protocol is basically all public. If you want DMs you need to work out an E2EE layer that can still tolerate moderation and a propagation system that doesn't leak details of who is messaging who. That's all very hard to do right. Even signal spent years trying to get this right and they have pretty centralized infrastructure. I'd rather no DMs at first with the expectation that they'll be done properly when they actually ship.

> And only 90 second videos? Really?

Mastodon sets a video limit of 99MB. If you wanted to match the quality of a 1080p 30fps youtube video for example, that 99MB would buy you about 82 seconds. So the 90 second limit really isn't that unreasonable. And if you want a longer form, external video embeds have been supported in the app since the beta.