I have no idea what the views of the person in the article are, but the Idea of a supposedly federated platform like blusky banning people is a bit rediculous. It only works while you have one big instance but once federation comes it may get messy.

Bluesky is moderated. If you sign-up from bsky.app, you are subscribed to Bluesky Moderation Service, and you cannot unsubscribe (as a requirement for Bluesky to even be allowed on the Apple AppStore).

As a user, you can host self-host your data on a PDS (personal data server), and Bluesky will scrape the internet for your account data and relay it into their app. Anyone with the means can scrape and relay data, but it's expensive and currently only Bluesky does this.

Anyone who operates a relay and runs an AtProto-powered app has full discretion over what they allow on their platform. In theory, you can certainly launch your own third-party version of Bluesky populated with existing users from bsky.social. However, there is no guarantee that bsky.social users will be able to see your content unless they log-in from a third-party app.

For more details about Bluesky's moderation architecture, click here.