Yeah, Bluesky’s moderation really is abysmal. Somebody I know got suspended for 24 hours for saying something about Charlie Kirk and when they came back immediately moved their account to Blacksky … and who can blame them!

Right now blacksky.community is an app that uses Bluesky’s AppView, which in turn uses Bluesky’s Relay. They’re working on their own AppView (which will have the equivalent of local-only posts) and that will use their Relay. I didn’t mean to undercut your point though, they often talk about PDSs as analogous to web pages, so your “different search engines” analogy is very accurate, it’s just not quite there yet.

And good point about Hubzilla … if I recall correctly either in (((streams))) or Forte (or maybe both) MIke implemented the nomadic identity over ActivityPub as well. It’s really frustrating that AP development in general hasn’t paid more attention to his ideas! If you’re thinking about this kind of stuff for Lemmy, it’s also worth looking at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-ef61-portable-objects/3738

At the app level (blacksky.community / bsky.app on the web) it’s more like TweetDeck/Twitter: different client interfaces to the same underlying network. That’s not a perfect analogy though because Blacksky makes different moderation decisions than Bluesky.

But also, people using either of these apps can store their data in arbitrary PDSs, so when people migrate their accounts to the Blacksky PDS they can use either of the apps. So there it’s more like Piefed/Lemmy – different implementations of the same protocol. Again though it’s not a perfect analogy because the AT Protocol architecture lets you migrate all your data between PDSs seamlessly, and so far only a few niche ActivityPub implementations support that (Hubzilla et al with nomadic identity, ActivityPods using Solid Pods).

It’s not a silly question! I’d describe it more as an alternative to Bluesky, not really a competitor; all of the infrastructure and algorithms we’ve designed are fully interoperable with the rest of Bluesky. Rudy Fraser’s 🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable is a good overview, including a description of the approach to decentralization

And no, it’s not only for Black people. That said, as they get farther down the line they’ll have some areas that are Black-only (using an approach that’s based on fedi’s local-only posts).