Agreed that Bluesky shouldn't be trusted, they're VC-funded and are likely to go the exploitative and/or enshittification route once there's revenue pressure. In terms of the original question as to whether or not they should be considered part of the fediverse, that puts them in the same category as Wordpress and Flipboard. It's intellectually consistent to say none of them are; it's not intellectually consistent to say Wordpress and Flipboard are but Bluesky isn't for this reason. (Although other reasons for excluding them might be intellectually consistent, for example the Diaspora analogy -- I don't particularly agree with it, but it hangs together, it's just a different conclusion that flows from a different view of whether bridges not implemented by a platform count)

And @oblomov you're right that AP wasn't specifically designed for giving an advantage to large instances. I once asked Evan what scalability analysis had been done as part of the standardization process and he said "none!" Still, it's an obvious consequence of the protocol, nothing's been done to address that over the years, and Threads decided it's a good match for them. So I don't see as much of a difference on that front as you do.

@FediTips @skarnio

@FediTips @oblomov @thenexusofprivacy This, for me, is one of the main criteria for not trusting the AT protocol.