Bluesky has published a roadmap for their current development plans for the AT Protocol that powers the network. It can be found here, and it is a fairly technical read, focused on developers. There are still quite some things of interest for regular users in it:
Federation is coming, scheduled for early 2024
DMs are coming, but quite a way off.
The main work that the Bluesky team is focused on is getting to federation. This will allow the network to properly scale, as the current infrastructure starts to hit its limits. Federation is currently available in a separate testing environment for developers. The developers are currently working on completing the final parts of the protocol that enables federation to happen. Most of the technical roadmap is dedicated to the individual work items that are happening, or need to happen. The infrastructure that is currently used on the live network now has most parts in place to allow federation to happen. Altogether the team estimates that the network will open up to everyone via federation in early 2024.
DMs are an often requested feature, and people regularly mention that the only reason they still use their X account is to access DMs. Implementing DMs requires significant additions to the protocol, as currently all information is public. Proper end-to-end encrypted messaging needs to be added for DMs to work. The team is currently planning on focusing on this after federation is complete. The amount of work that is needed, means that DMs are still quite some time away, and should not be expected any time soon.
Another important part of the roadmap is that governance of the protocol will be submitted to an independent standards body, which I’ll talk more about in a next update.
@laurenshof there's no DMs on bluesky? Just further evidence that Bluesky is a disaster and people should just join mastodon and embrace decentralized social media
