i will give bluesky this - i'm not interested in using it, but i maintain at least an academic interest in it, unlike some of the competition
given threads took (and then lost) normies and brands, what's the long term business model?
what are the limitations of the domain name as username?
how long can a subdomain go? how many subdomains can you have?
where are the alternative apps?
one of the things about twitter was the robust third party app ecosystem
a lot of those have now been retrofitted to mastodon, and are gradually implementing specific features like custom emoji
but again maybe it's just being not on bluesky and a whole lot of people we know not being on bluesky, but we have not heard people say "here's tweetdeck, but for bluesky" or "our activitypub app for mastodon can now communicate via AT protocol as well"; a few rumours of the latter that i don't think have gone anywhere.
the most i've seen is an equivalent to vxtwitter, which is arguably more necessary from the lack of web interface
cohost might not have any alternate apps right now either (to my knowledge), but with the tools people have made to help out with CSS, I feel like alternate clients will happen just as soon as there's an official API for them to work with, for very easy inline image placement or CSS
what happens when bluesky federates
this is ultimately our big question
because one of bluesky's stated big advantages for people leaving twitter is that it's a simple drop in replacement; to just sign up to the one centralized server and start posting 280char messages
and that's a fine assumption, for now
(perhaps in this respect, the lack of alternative clients is also a benefit)
but if their plan is still to federate, things get dicey rather quickly - bluesky's proposed federation model is more complex than mastodon's, so if people find that hard to deal with...
from a user perspective, my summary of masto would be
- you sign up for a server
- your timeline is on that server
- your data is on that server
- the server's owners set the rules for that server
- if the server's owners are an asshole, other servers may block it
- if that server goes down all your data is gone
my understanding of bluesky's AT protocol (based on memories of skimming through their dev documentation a few months back) is that if fully implemented, a bluesky user would have to specify the public data server they want their data to be stored on, a front end server for generating the timeline, and it'd possibly need a third server for things like "having a media tab"
which of the timeline or public data servers sets the rules? i genuinely have no idea and i'm not looking it up at this time of night
a lot of conceptual simplicity just goes out of the window immediately unless they by default make the assumption you want the defaults on everything