The federated social web is my main social platform (using this account).
It's not my identity to defend or shit on it. But I do have many criticisms with regards to culture, product and project management as well as many questions about sustainability (financially and socially). It's important to address those questions honestly, curiously and openly. To accept that currently this is a social sphere that excludes many groups for a whole bunch of reasons (many of them coming from the dominant culture here). And we're not really doing a great job.

On the other hand I find it a bit weird how many people publish their hagiographies of Bluesky here without any deeper analysis. Federated Web vs. Bluesky is way too often an identity thing. About defining one's own crowd as the actually cool ones or whatever. It's not helping anyone really.

Personally I do think that going the VC route again is a structural mistake that is very hard - if not impossible - to recover from. The Bluesky team disagrees. On the other hand I don't feel like the "but we are open source software, you can run your own thing - that lacks core features you expect" is a great sales pitch either.