It was created by techbros for techbros and very early on taken over by the exact audience they didn't want (i.e. lots of queer folks and progressive/borderline-leftist people). The selling point was the stronger moderation features: blocklists, detaching quote posts, etc. The userbase went to shit when the site opened up, no longer required invites, and liberals flooded it in November 2024, but keeping a following list small and subscribing to a shit ton of blocklists does make the site usable and still better than twitter's nazi bar, but that's not exactly a high bar to clear.

It's technically decentralized but ATProto is dogshit and can hardly be considered a decentralized protocol. If the main site goes down, pretty much every independent host goes with it. The devs are also heavily on-board the AI train and proudly shout about how the whole site is practically vibecoded at this point while also cooling off their phones in the pool (something one of their most senior devs actually did).

Also the site barely fucking works lately lmao. The past two weeks it's been borderline unusable because nothing will even load for most of the day. Incredible stuff.

Also worth noting that the devs and former CEO explicitly allowed actual high profile nazis like jesse singal to stick around, while they constantly ban Palestinians seeking aid and trans folks standing up for themselves. They're omega pissed that they didn't cultivate their crypto techbro audience they wanted from the beginning.

tldr it's a mess. It's better than twitter, but it's still a giant fucking mess. why the internet seemed to collectively decide this was a better choice than say Mastodon is beyond me.

Unrelated to your other replies:

Lantian "Jay" Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, whose name (蓝天) literally translates to "Blue Sky" in English, was not involved with the website until after she joined and is purely co-incidental.

My understanding is that bluesky has full support for federation on a technical level. I would agree with describing it as fake federated, because probably over 90% of users/content are on the flagship instance. If the flagship instance defederates from yours you've probably lost most of the reasons you had for joining bluesky and will want to switch. If they change their mind entirely about federation, even the users you followed that weren't on the flagship themselves will probably be switching over, so you've essentially lost your entire community unless you switch yourself. When one instance has most of the userbase, the whole network outside it can be killed if they decide to switch off federation.

This is actually why the join-lemmy site is coded to only display instances with under (iirc) 30% of the user share. Right now that's .world that won't show until their usershare drops under.

As far as why they would do that, I assume just as another way to market it? Probably hoping to syphon off some mastodon users or selfhosters at its inception to get the userbase growing.