[bayindirh]

What prevents Bluesky from slighyly and slowly manipulating these feeds for their gain in the mid-term?

Bluesky is not like Mastodon. You control own your data, but traffic chokes at a central point, and the firehose is still controlled, AFAIK, so you can't just federate, and run your own algorithm on your instance and call it a day?

[steveklabnik]

“On your instance” doesn’t make sense because the way that the parts are split up isn’t the same as mastodon.

If you write a custom feed, you control what’s in it. If you use a feed by someone else, they control what’s in it.

In theory Bluesky could secretly change their client to mess with the feed subtly, but if you aren’t using their client, then they can’t.

Feeds are on top of the firehose, not below it.

[bayindirh]

> if you aren’t using their client, then they can’t.

This is my point. How many people won't use "their" client, sans the knowledgeable people?

Mastodon is much more fragmented than Bluesky, so an intentional feed manipulation is only visible to the users of that instance.