This effectively means that, if you get banned by the Bluesky company, you're out. Sure, you could still host your own Personal Data Server, wait for a non-existent independent Relay to fetch your data and interact with users of third-party Bluesky applications. But you won't: you're effectively at the mercy of the Bluesky company.

Point two, and more importantly: this approach provides an "exit strategy" in the event that Bluesky "goes evil". Right now, that's false: parts of the social network are still centralized and it's impossible to avoid that. But even if we limit ourselves to PDSs and Relay, the current situation is that federation is only achievable in theory and no one has done it in practice yet.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 17 points 21 hours ago

Yep.

Its 'federated' as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.

So functionally, their 'federation' system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.

It's psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 14 hours ago

I still don't understand how the PDS concept matters in an interconnected network of replies. Conversations are threaded, and that "personal data" needs all parties involved in the chain to move to this new thing at the same time. It's not going to happen.