In my experience, Mastodon clients handle large posts (say 5000 chars instead of 500) very well.
> In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits.
Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.
Involuntarily when I say decentralized I'm thinking about more peer-to-peer distribution of content (a la torrents), instead of federated. Mastodon instances are these islands of content, at the whims of the owner, as to what content you can see and what policies they think there should be. Your identity is also attached to the instance, migration isn't seamless and you can't just move around your account like a domain name.
My understanding of Bluesky, actually the AT protocol, is that there are features in there to allow you to own your identity (via domain names) which would make migration between instances seamless. At the same time, there is a different deployable services for redistributing (filtered/moderated) content.
Based on posts I've seen on HN, these were still partial of planned things (?). On the other hand, not even sure if there are self-hosted Bluesky instances yet.
> which would make migration between instances seamless.
Which instances? :)
If you're referring to "Personal Data Stores", sure. However, it's the "Relay" (i.e. the aggregator that generates timelines) that everyone relies on is centralized. In contrast, with Mastodon for example, both "Personal Data Store" and "Relay" functionalities are decentralised, offering a complete solution with no centralised choke-points. At least that's my non-authoritative understanding.
There is this lengthy blog post, _How decentralized is Bluesky really?_ [0], if you want to read more about the differences between Bluesky and ActivityPub (e.g. Mastodon).
Thanks for the clarification. That makes more sense now.
I host my own GoToSocial instance, with only me as it's single user. Doesn't get much more decentralized than that.
I guess it's easier to move your identity to a different PDS on Bluesky, but for me Bluesky doesn't count as decentralized as long as there's only one single relay. You may own your identity, but currently Bluesky (the company) owns the network.
> In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits.
Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.