Surely we’ve learned by now that decentralization and markets don’t mix well

Bluesky is not making a reddit alternative, a third party developer is using their hosting/auth infrastructure.

https://bsky.app/profile/frontpage.fyi
https://github.com/likeandscribe/frontpage

I asked the devs about this and they said that bluesky is designed to be a) modular b) trustless as much as possible. federation is supposed to happen on the trustless hosting and relay layers - you can ask your posts to be crawled by any indexer/appview.

But once you get to the indexing/querying layer, there are no more merkle proofs to keep everyone honest, so there is no point in federating because any indexer can modify/censor the content they send to another indexer instance. So you could still build an api to interact laterally between servers, but it wouldn’t be atproto anymore.

uhh could you clarify for me how the fediverse works? I thought it was like 90% mastodon which is very much the twitter format