The great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that

The question is do you trust a healthy user-empowering ecosystem will form around a VC-fueled corporation that controls 97+% of the bluesky network? https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

I wish Mastodon had been ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. And, I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.

But, most of the Twitter folks I followed went to Bsky, so I have an account. I guess we just have to hope that even though all the signs point to a terrible end for Bsky, maybe the kind of cantankerous users who left Twitter early and built the culture there will keep them honest. The incentives are not aligned and neither are the people who run it (they honestly don't seem to like the most interesting Bsky posters very much, e.g. Link was permabanned), so, I'm not extremely hopeful.

Mastodon instances struggled before the influx.

> I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.

It’s more like, “I wish decentralized services like the Fediverse were ready for the average person.”

Currently, if you decide to join Mastodon (which some people will correctly say is “not a thing,” ironically proving my point), you have to figure out which server to join, then find out that the server you joined is at capacity and struggling, or discover that it blocks federation with servers you might be interested in.

Bootstrapping your feed in Mastodon is also not fun.

Mastodon is not a social media site, it is software for running social media sites. Many of them exist.

Yes, it is software that was not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. "Mastodon" is also the biggest Mastodon instance, where new people would first land when seeking Twitter alternatives, which was also not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came.

NYC could also pipe their own PDS right into NYC mobile apps, email notifications, etc. in this context.

Why would they use a PDS as a source of truth for that? Surely they just have a guy with an excel spreadsheet who posts on all platforms

Poor systems thinking. They'd likely use Buffer or a similar social media management platform. Operating their own PDS means they control the source of truth, just like running their own Wordpress instance. Could they pay someone else to host the PDS? Sure, that works too. Either way, it is about controlling their communications infra.

Ok so why would they use a PDS instead of using Buffer?

What do you do if you want to cancel Buffer in the future? Buffer is the orchestration and scheduler, PDS is persistent storage.