Are we decentralized yet?

Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem.

I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems.

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to.

I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

What even is "moderation" at this point? I'm not sure this word is used as defined on paper dictionaries. It is a codeword for something else, like censorship or influencing or artificial control of public opinion?

Because, if it's purely about filtering out content not desired by users, it could be nearly trivially done at the edge, automatic and completely de-humanized, and the word as appearing lately doesn't read that way to me.

I get where you're coming from, and I have largely the same sentiment, but it's obvious that you've never had any experience running a platform, or using one with no/few rules. You need baseline moderation, even if it isn't super ideological. You've got to keep pedophiles and misanthropes out at the very least.