Does Bluesky manipulate one’s feed or does it let it be based on the user’s subscriptions’ posts posted in reverse chronological order, filtered by the user’s preferences? Like Mastodon does?

Bluesky lets you configure your feeds, or add new ones: https://bsky.app/feeds

Default Bluesky has the "Discover" feed and the "Following" feed. The "Discover" feed is the equivalent of the algorithmic "For you" feed in X, but you can always unpin it.

The "Following" feed is close to what you want I think.

Not only can you get reverse chronological feed, you can build your own feed with custom logic with a few clicks and share it with other people!

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-skyfeed#what-is-skyfeed

Awesome!

Your “following” is reverse chronological.

I don't see one or the other as having won or lost. I don't know anyone on bsky and various people on Mastodon, also before joining Mastodon about a year ago, but hear bsky is bigger on the whole. Probably a regional thing, and part of what I seek on this type of platform is local people and news. Heard of an open day of the Effelsberg radio telescope for example, which was a really nice experience and I'm not sure by what other means I could have learned of it (following all places of interest in a large radius separately perhaps? How would discovery of new places work?). It simply fulfills its purpose for me rather than being a "total sore loser"

I also really enjoy the inclusivity features like content warnings, filters, and alt texts. Didn't know I'd want these but it has been super nice around the USA election period, or when videos don't load on mobile data you can just read the text and know whether to bother with further attempts. Dunno if bsky has feature parity there or if people make use of it. My Mastodon instance in particular is quite... I don't want to say strict, but there's a good culture about it

> Dunno if bsky has feature parity there or if people make use of it.

Alt text and filters, yes. Content warnings: currently only for posts with media; hopefully this gets addressed at some point: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/5341

>they're so proud that they're actually decentralized and self hosted (even tho most users are on mastadon.social)

Sorry, is any of that supposed to be wrong? People who use a decentralised platform aren't going to be fans of a new, mostly-centralised platform, I don't see how that's being sore losers. I also don't think most people on the Fediverse expect mainstream adoption any time soon, and many don't want it either.

They’re saying the talk about being distributed but generally congregate heavily on one (centralized) instance

Being on a large instance doesn't mean you don't care about decentralisation, you can still choose to migrate to a different instance if you want. The whole point is you're not locked in to one vendor and you can move if you want to, not that everyone should have to live on their own island

Sure… but you can see why it makes it hard to care (and in particular stomach the complexity of coming onboard)

Somehow the tone of your first paragraph doesn't match the content of the other two. They make it seem like the Mastodonians are pretty much Right™

> they still regularly ban right wingers

No. There are plenty of conservatives on Bluesky and Threads.

They get banned when they cross the line and start being deliberately antagonistic.