Saw this little gem today on Mastodon. That sure didn’t take long, did it?
And this is why legitimate federation - not just the promise of it - is important, kids!
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This is my shocked face… 
That took even less time than I expected.
REAL federation is messy but it’s resilient, something that fake corpo “federation” will never be.
Considering the current situation we need all the resiliency we can get.
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Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that struck me about Bluesky - the underlying interpretation of what “federated” means is different enough as to be effectively centralized. Their implementation dictates the architecture as it were, because they prize “seeing everything all the time” over “division of processing and replication”.
It can be federated in “the standard way”, but it’s prohibitively expensive (and complicated) for the average person to host their own instance(s).
From all that I’ve read, their view of “federation” is basically “the current ‘owners’ could step away and a new one could come in with no disruption to the users”. It’s a pretty self-serving definition, if you ask me.
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I’ve heard about the “firehose” feed delivery system, which IIRC means anyone trying to set up a “federated” duplicate of the service has to take every post at all times and that just screams intent to obfuscate the meaning of federation to me.
As you said it’s possible to federate it but only at scale and cost prohibitive to almost everyone.
The problem is less who owns it but that it can be owned at all.
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Exactly. That’s why I never fully invested in my presence there. Just there for “monitoring purposes” to see where they go with it.
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