From what I understand of the protocol, the federation just isn’t the same but provides some of the same benefits. Im not an expert, correct if wrong.

Essentially when I looked into it, the main benefits are stuff I actually prefer as opposed to the current implementation on fediverse in some regards.

The main idea being that users own their data on their own server (or collective server) and can choose to remove or take that data elsewhere to different apps or potentially even accounts. This is a lacking feature in the fediverse and it’s a common contention. If I get blocked on Lemmy or Mastodon, my data goes away. Especially since most people are not likely to host an instance themselves (since it’s an awful user experience) whereas BlueSky data can easily be stored by a third party that is trusted.

But yes you’re right, this still promotes large platforms. However again it gives users more control over what they host on which platforms and keeps their data in one place. That’s a huge advantage imo.

I don’t so much mind this future. It’s not quite the free speech platform that the fediverse is but it’s closer. Moderation can be much more lax and focus on TOS breaking or illegal things. And hey if at some point BlueSky is too woke or whatever the hell people say, they can literally pick up their server with their content and build an app elsewhere. The implementation is different but the end point is largely the same which is cool.