The Bluesky project from Twitter is not just a clone of ActivityPub/Fediverse. It is even more diabolical, and I know why Elon is taking Twitter private.

This is my guess of how Twitter’s BlueSky works:

BlueSky project separates identity from content aggregation. Anybody can set up an identity by generating a key-pair that digitally signs every tweet they broadcast. Your identity has to be approved by the content aggregators much like a Certificate Authority approves your HTTPS setup. Your tweet isn’t visible on the Federated Timeline unless it is blessed and approved by the content Aggregator server(s). Anybody can setup a content aggregator server too, but each content aggregator has to publish a zero-knowledge proof that they have followed the censorship policy set by Twitter. Content addressing like that of IPFS CID is used to help every content aggregator discover missing content in their servers.

So BlueSky is simultaneously federated and authoritarian at the same time. It has a globally/centrally mandated censorship policy, which every instance of the federated server has to follow, and every server has to convince each other they censor all content in the same way by generating zero-knowledge proofs.