If the answer is that most people should just make a bluesky account, that defeats the whole purpose because then everyone will still be on one or two large providers.
This also completely misunderstands the architecture. Things don't hinge on the relays at all and they don't act as routers.
There isn’t such a thing as “Bluesky getting federated” — that doesn’t on its own mean anything. In Mastodon world, “getting federated” means many copies of the same webapp emailing each other. In atproto, you don’t create many copies of the same app. Instead, it’s shaped like the web — individual users can host their data in different places, and apps aggregate over that data. There’s no point in having many copies of the same app.
The BGS server you’re referring to is the “relay” mentioned in the article. Running your own relay is possible (Blacksky does it, as mentioned in the article). It costs about $30/mo with the current traffic. However, note that a relay is very dumb (it’s just a retransmitter of signed JSON over websocket). It’s cool that anyone can run one but by itself this isn’t a vanity metric to chase. We’ll probably see more independent relays but usually someone would run one for a reason — to insulate a company or a community from upstream failures, or maybe to censor things (in repressive governments).
If I'm going to delete my Facebook/Instagram account then why am I trying to pick up a new drug to replace it?
I think many people find social media useful. If you aren't one of those people, fair enough. But not everyone is angry and addicted all the time.
I'm not going to claim that social media can't have negative consequences for young people, lots of things do. But the hyperbole behind the discourse makes it obvious there is also a moral panic at work. In every case, technology is blamed for a failure of society's responsibility to educate and raise children properly.
There is not a whole lot of scientific evidence for it being good from what I understand.
I would also argue that if you broaden the definition of social media too far you’re not really talking about social media anymore. Calling your friends on Signal isn’t “social media.”
And the definition of social media is broad. I would argue Signal is social media. It lets you form social networks, chat and share different kinds of media. That's all social media is. Social media is more than Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. And I have trouble with the argument that being able to form social networks and share different kind of media is somehow ontologically evil. There are hundreds of social media platforms around the world and countless apps integrating social features, but only a few American platforms seem to be a problem. So maybe it isn't "social media," maybe it's American culture and Silicon Valley capitalism.
The addiction loops, surveillance, data mining, radicalization through algorithms promoting extremist content, etc. aren't fundamental to what social media is, they're aspects of how specific social media platforms have been implemented. It is possible to have social media without all of those negative externalities.