Thinking a lot today about what matters to me in a social app. Lately, I've been alternating between mastodon and bluesky for my posts. More recently, I re-discovered write-freely as I'm working on writing more free-form articles.
I appreciate the complete isolation of each mastodon instance because if an admin goes rogue then it only affects the people on that instance and, while frustrating, there is an opportunity to switch servers.
Bluesky, on the other hand, while technically being federated, is actually quite centralized. There are a few things I do like, though. Firstly, is the identity system. I really like that it uses existing infrastructure for identity (DNS). I also like there is one unified interface. One of my concerns with mastodon is if there is a really-cool-feature that lands that requires a software update, you're dependent on your home server's admin to update the software to enable that feature for you. This isn't a big issue in practice, although I wonder if it's not a big issue specifically because they realize it's untenable and therefore nobody tries to rock the boat too much.
Recently, I tried creating my own federated protocol and realized it was kind of pointless because unless there is an existing userbase of the software there isn't much sense in federating the data. I've been debating creating a markdown type of editing thing but the software I'm already writing this on already does that and already has social protocols in place that are compatible.
One thing I like about writing prose vs writing code is that you don't need to have your writing “compile”. If the compiler in a program doesn't understand a single character your entire project fails. Whereas with natural language, even if someone only gleans a tiny insight, I would still consider that a “win”