From what I gather yes and no.

The fediverse is decentralized as it uses a protocol activity pub to allow lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc to all talk. Moreover, most of the servers (to my knowledge) are community run. For example lemmy.world.

Bluesky made a new protocol similar to activity pub that could be used in a similar way, but its only used by Bluesky. They have allowed other users to host their own servers, but Bluesky still hosts the main servers (from what information I could find).

It seems bluesky wants to be similar to Fediverse applications, but I would have almost preferred how Threads did it; they actually use activity pub, so from mastodon you could follow threads users and vice versa. The Fediverse community wasn’t fond of Threads so most servers defederated (or blocked) the Threads servers.

I feel Bluesky is doing something similar to threads. Its a corporation first that wants you to think its like the community first decentralized social networks. My take is, better than Meta/X, but I stick to Fediverse applications.

Good to know, thanks!

Have you used loops? I tried to sign up and its been ~6 hours without a verification email. Its great they have a testflight app on iOS but I’ve been looking for an android apk with no luck. I really want a federated tik tok to blow up but I’m finding it hard to even get set up.

“Awards”?