TL;DR: Bluesky isn’t feasibly federated due to hardware demands of self-hosting the relay—which would require every instance to host the same, synced copy of the entirety of Twitter everywhere—among other things, but is great at providing what its committed corporation calls a centralized “credible exit“: “if Bluesky Social PBC goes out of business or loses users’ trust, other providers can step in to provide an equivalent service using the same dataset and the same protocols”
That seems less than ideal. And yet, here we are with it being way more popular than Mastodon.
Were people really that damn confused over “which instance do I join”?
People don’t care about decentralization as long as they have a credible exit; in fact, many may prefer the features of centralization. Bluesky also has an algorithm.
Could be as simple as blue sky having the money behind it to advertise it more
Yeah I could see this being a big factor. Advertising money can also mean directly paying people to use it, and hoping some of their followers might come along.
It’s not.
