What's Mastodon precious?

Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don't understand but it's something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn't trust it.

there is a critical 'relay' component that only they control. so you can setup your own 'node', but only connected to their instance.
only a single instance of the relay exists and they are not releasing that code and a few other pieces. it federates only with itself.
- That pretty much sounds centralised. But I guess people don't care if they don't have to worry about "picking a server" which is "too complicated" 🤷
  
  i think the new paradigm of the distributed fediverse is going to take a long time to propagate to the masses. its going to be lots of platforms advertising their corner of the 'verse and the features they permit.. but we really need to get the idea of the 'fediverse' into their heads that its content accessible by any of those platforms.
  the thing ive noticed is no one cares about 'sites' anymore.. the kids all want 'apps' which is drivin me bonkers. spent decades building mobile-friendly, dynamic viewports only for them to get ignored cuz kids dont want to type in a URL/domain.
  
  My impression is that it hasn't been users that have pushed everything into apps, it's been publishers. This is all a part of a general trend where software has become much less about what it can do for the user, and much more about what data it can extract from a user for the publisher. Websites generally have a lot more protections against such data scraping, meanwhile you can put who knows what code into an app.
  
  If you look at how RSS fell from use, there were two major issues. On the user side, users had to go out to find content as there wasn't an inherent way to search for content within the system. On the creator side, creators had to deal with advertising themselves to users and they had to handle the monetization by themselves.
  Social media created the algorithm to find content and developed some revenue sharing with creators.
  If federated media takes off, it will probably look like Threads or Truth Social, where control of a front end monetizes development of the platform.
  
  OT, but most of my students in their 20s can barely use keyboards. It really stresses them out and they get mad about it. Papers are either copy-paste then AI filtered a few times, or speech-to-text with a quick grammerly scan. Drives me bonkers too. Just to say, I'm sorry your work isn't appreciated.
  "The Digital Native generation are technological geniuses because they can usually intuit which icon to click. Let us praise them and give them as much screentime as we can." - All the news pieces and academic articles from 2000-2010ish
  
  That’s exactly what people want: no brainer alternative without the fediverse’s fragmentation
  
  you pick a server with bluesky
Jack Dorsey has nothing by to do with Bluesky and hasn’t for a while now.
- Holy shit, Dorsey is eve fucking dumber than I could have ever imagined:
  The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralised social network he helped start, and encouraged users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
  Dorsey confirmed he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday, telling a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was apparently unexpected, since Bluesky still listed him as a board member until late on Sunday evening.
  ...
  “Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”

I believe it's sort of tacked on and not exactly federated at the moment. Also it's corporate run

In theory, yes. In practice, it's a bit different. At the very least for now.

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474

well, until they release all the code, and allow full federation its not a federating platform. end of story.

It calls itself federated, but it's false advertising.

In theory, yes / kind of.

In practice, no, not really.

It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.

To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.

Also, as others have pointed out... even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS... all of these still go through 'Relays', which BlueSky controls.

So... it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS... but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.

Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.

If the Relays go down, everything goes down.

If BlueSky decides they don't appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.

As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.

Nope. It's unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value

I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance... But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really