While out for my run this morning, I was listening to a recent episode of Aaron Ross Powell’s podcast in which he talks with Mike Masnick. The conversation was all about decentralizing the internet, mostly focused Bluesky (Masnick sits on Bluesky’s board of directors).

I am not interested in an ideological fight over Bluesky v. Mastodon. I have a Bluesky account and it seems fine, although I personally prefer the community on Mastodon. I have some underlying questions about the company’s long-term business prospects, but at a tech protocol level, they mostly seem fine. I also have no beef with Masnick; I think he writes really good stuff at Techdirt and I agree with most everything he has to say about what has gone wrong with the internet and how we might start undoing that and making it better.

While the conversation does acknowledge other decentralized protocols and platforms, it is almost entirely about Bluesky. Makes sense, as that is where Masnick’s main interest lies. Mastodon does come up at one point, though, and that is when they are talking about whether decentralized stuff is harder for people to use.

Masnick says:

But I think Bluesky, and this was very deliberate in how they looked at it, was that they didn’t want most people thinking about the underlying stuff. This was a problem, I think, with Mastodon, where you know, from the get-go, it was very important that people bought into the ideology of decentralization. Just even in the fact that you initially had a pick from a long list of servers, and that was very confusing.

From the very beginning, Bluesky made it clear that they wanted to, you know, as I was talking about earlier, they wanted to have this experience that felt just like the centralized experience. So that if you don’t need to know about the decentralized nature or the protocol beneath it, you don’t have to. You don’t have to ever think about it.”

I have heard this sort of thing a lot, and while I think the “You have to pick from a list of servers and it is confusing” complaint is maybe a bit overstated, I am willing to grant that, yes—stuff like this can be off-putting to new users, especially those of a less technical bent.

What I don’t understand, though, is how Bluesky and the AT protocol are meaningfully different in this regard.

Yes, when you want to sign up for a Bluesky account for the first time, you go to their website and create one, just as you would with any of the traditional social media platforms. The part I don’t understand—and maybe this is simply my own ignorance of the AT protocol that underlies Bluesky—is whether this ease-of-use is inherent to the protocol itself.

On Mastodon, you have to pick from a list of servers because a bunch of people have spun up their own Mastodon instances, which are all interoperable because they all used the ActivityPub protocol. Once you’ve got an account, though, you can follow and interact with people on other servers without much trouble.

Right now, Bluesky is the only AT protocol instance, so there is a single front door. What happens if/when other AT instances start popping up? That is, after all, one of the benefits that Masnick touts, i.e., that if something bad happens with Bluesky, anyone is free to start up their own instance.

Is there something inherently different about the AT protocol such that—even when there are more instances than just Bluesky—they’ll all just be interoperable? Or will I still have to pick which one I want to join? If the latter, then how is that actually any simpler an experience for new users than Mastodon offers?

Regardless of the answer, however, I don’t think it is really worth a fight over whether Mastodon or Bluesky is better. A lot of it comes down to what you prefer in terms of UI and community experience, and either one is a massive improvement over Facebook and Twitter (which you should get the hell off of if you’re still there).