is there anything particularly compelling about it compared to a centralized platform? honestly still just waiting for the android app to not have terrible startup time and for there to be anybody on it
BlueSky feels like a centralized platform, which is (IMHO) important for user experience. Especially as a new user. But it's got the underlying tech of a distributed one, which means cool things. For example, I can run my own "algorithms" (in the sense that lay people talk about "the twitter algorithm" or "the facebook algorithm") or use ones that others have made, easily. There's a lot of interesting things technical users can do, and it's designed in such a way that non-technical users can take advantage of those things.
To use this, I just click through, and then "pin to home." it becomes a regular tab that I can view my feed through, just like the default ones. The "Quiet posters" algorithm here is one I'm actually interested in: I have often said one issue with the default algorithm is that I feel like I miss people who aren't actively posting when I happen to actively load up BlueSky. Now I can just check in on this feed and see those posts! What's going on here is very technically interesting, but as a user, I don't need to worry about any of that.
AT is what enables this, but is also broader than "short text posts." I am interested by future possibilities for AT, but that's more of a vision than something concrete today.
> is there anything particularly compelling about it compared to a centralized platform?
As a user? I'd say custom feeds. You can create alternative feeds using whatever algorithm you want that users can subscribe to in a way that is very smooth and user friendly. Third party alternatives have the feel of first party features.
As a developer? The protocol is "locked open," as it were. I feel confident building on it. It feels more like building for the web than within a walled garden. Bluesky could have made things easier for themselves by making certain aspects centralized, but they didn't compromise.
> honestly still just waiting for the android app to not have terrible startup time and for there to be anybody on it
There is a alternative client (https://graysky.app/) that you may have better luck with. Same deal as with custom feeds. They are not territorial about the existence of alternatives. The Graysky dev (@mozzius.dev) and the Bluesky social-app devs are very friendly with each other and share development techniques all the time.
Also, the official app has a Github repo (https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app) that accepts issues and PRs. I opened an issue recently as some icons were wrong in a particular location. Some non-team affiliated developer created a fix, opened a PR, and the core team merged it in and deployed it a few days later. That was pretty cool.
The community is interesting and while it definitely has a tech-y bias, it's a lot less Liberachat adjacent than big Fediverse instances are, so you get people in other niches using it. The community is still a lot smaller than Twitter though, which lends itself to feeling like a community more than being part of The Conversation that I presume Twitter goes for. The UX is very similar to Twitter. For me, my hobbies just aren't that well represented on Bluesky yet, but I like how nice the community feels. Just my impressions.
