social.growyourown.services is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Single-user Mastodon instance for the Grow Your Own Services site

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I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:

🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.

:Fediverse: The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.

@FediTips The thing that is missing from your diagram is that while #Fediverse servers CAN communicate with each other, not all of them DO. This is most noticeable when you follow a #hashtag - If you are on a large, well connected instance you will see many (maybe almost all) posts containing that hashtag. If you are on a small instance, or an instance that is not well connected (for whatever reason) you will see only a small percentage (maybe close to 0%) of the posts made using that hashtag.

In situations like that, from the user's perspective the #Bluesky / AT protocol is superior, because with the centralized server and corporate relays pretty much anything posted using a given hashtag will be seen by all those who follow that hashtag.

I'm not saying we all should move to Bluesky. I'm saying that this is a problem that needs to be solved by whoever writes the software for #Mastodon and similar Fediverse instances. And if there already is a solution but few instances are using it, what is that solution and where can you find a list of instances that are already using it? I understand there will always be some blockages because instance operators don't want traffic from certain types of instances, but I'm not talking about that, I am talking about cases where a post with a hashtag doesn't reach your instance because no one using your instance is specifically following the user that made that post.

@maple @FediTips ok, but having all the data stored in a single, owned, instance (like BlueSky) would potentially expose users to an unknown future... as it happened with the current "big tech". I would rather prefer fixing and improving what is not working in the fedivese, which is the Real Alternative. I wish a future were we always own data, regardless of the app/technology we use

Fedi.Tips

@skamu @maple

Yeah, this is another worry. BlueSky's valuation is approaching 1 billion dollars, and part of that will be the user data they expect to hoard.

"I wish a future were we always own data, regardless of the app/technology we use"

I think @timbl has been working on something like this for some time with the Solid project?