(I rewrote the title seven times, I'm just going with this)
I tried Bluesky because of its growing popularity, and I'm confused about its supposedly decentralized nature. Yes, you can "own" your account with a custom domain, but everything else is centralized onto the one instance which is Bluesky - there's no federation or anything like that (?) so I don't see why people promote it as being anti-big corporation even though it may become that at this rate.
With Mastodon/ActivityPub, federated instances connect through the underlying software that they all share. Heck, you can even communicate with other software like Lemmy through the ActivityPub protocol. Sure, I guess you don't "own" your account/likes/etc, but I think it's way better than being locked in to solely one instance and not having the ability to switch if the one your using doesn't appeal to you in some way.
I'm sure I'm missing and/or an incorrect on some information about all this, so I'm really just hoping someone can explain it in a way that I understand.
If I understand it correctly, it's "federated" in the sense that you can create similar infrastructure to Bluesky's using ATProto and have your posts show up there, but that reality seems pretty academic because not many people are doing that compared to Mastodon.