@folkerschamel @mmasnick @mastodonmigration @mmasnick.bsky.social I think the contention here is that Mastodon GMBH is to the Fediverse as Bluesky PBC is to the Atmosphere: both individual companies develop software, run services with users, and participate in a larger ecosystem that they don't control[*]. Each company can be called a "central" entity, and the whole can be said to contain parts that are outside that center. This is the point that I understand Mike to be making that he thinks you are missing or confused about.At some level, this is correct. But I think this is a very shallow reading. If you look at the actual structure of these networks, they are very different. A large majority of the Fediverse is not subject to Mastodon GMBH's operational decisions (TOS, federation decisions, etc. ). There are other projects that rival the software produced by Mastodon GMBH in both scope and userbase. The pressures that shape the Fediverse are much larger *outside* of Mastodon GMBH that the ones that come from the company. There are tens of thousands of people in the Fediverse who, for better or worse, are social network administrators. Decisions are made by a huge set of people. atproto envisions a world where these things *could* happen - but so far as I know none of them are true of it today.I think it is a major mistake to gloss over these differences.[*] I think we will all concede that Bluesky does currently have significant control over the larger ecosystem through its control over atproto, but I am willing to give them the assumption of good faith in terms of handing off that control; they've started, and I assume they will complete the process.
