I'm happy with Mastodon and want the fediverse to succeed. I don't want one single project controlling the fediverse. I have a feeling Bluesky is trying to Microsoft (embrace, extend, extinguish) the fediverse. Why? Because there is no clear way to make money off people in the fediverse. You can't rent seek like the centralized services do. My sense is Bluesky is embracing federation the same way Microsoft embraced open source.
Given that Bluesky does not use ActivityPub, it's hard to make a case that it's embracing, extending, and extinguishing it, given that there's no embrace in the first place.
It's embracing just enough things that look vaguely ActivityPub-like if you squint and is getting a lot of marketing that the parts it didn't directly embrace it extended/chose "better" alternatives, such that from a PR perspective at least does seem to using a similar playbook, even if not that exact playbook.
That's a given, the concern is still valid that the asymmetric nature of the competition may be "unfair". One is an adopted open source standard of a small but diverse ecosystem and the other is a well-funded, seemingly more popular, more closed than open with a lot of vested interest in crashing the open source ecosystem.
Especially when it feels like the "more closed than open" is presenting itself as "open source" in what feels like a bait-and-switch to piggy-back on the goodwill of the actual open source ecology with a goal towards moving people (back) to more closed, corporate controlled tools.
("bait-and-switch" was the word I think I was looking for here.)
Literally 100% of this is open source. (Oh wait I think maybe one of the mobile apps isn't yet, but like, it's react native, IIRC, so it shareds most of it with the web app, even if not 100% of it is.) Yes it is true that there's no open governance yet. That is a problem. But let's talk about problems in a straightforward way, grounded in actual details, than in FUDdy ways.
"They are competing and I would have preferred if they weren't" is much easier to have an actual conversation about than "they're trying to EEE mastadon", which is inflammatory, inaccurate, and does not promote mutual understanding.
I think you are nearly intentionally misreading the conversation then. "They are competing in a way that seems like EEE for Mastodon because it feels like an open source bait-and-switch" can be a very useful, actual conversation. The conversation premise starts from a presumption "it's not EEE, but it feels close, let's discuss why/why not because it can help dispell fear, uncertainty, and doubt or sand-bag the FUD with reasons". FUD on its own isn't the problem, it's what you do with the FUD. People telling you that they feel FUD about a project can be a useful gut check and a place to examine what missing information or what missing evidence to go look for.
Personally, I believe that driving this towards meta-conversation is less useful to "promoting" mutual understanding than trying to use an analogy towards EEE as a way to describe feelings about a project. Analogies are useful constructs and dismissing analogies as "inflammatory and inaccurate", especially analogies involving feelings and opinions, is its own "inflammatory and inaccurate" move.
