shovel making equipment

I wouldn't recommend it either, because it doesn't exist yet. But its extremely disingenuous to make claims about how it will work when/if it begins federating in the future and declare it EEE.

Do you have any sources for that? I've seen no indication they don't intend to release the protocol as a standard and that is a pretty big assumption

There isn't a standard because the protocol/platform doesn't exist yet. "Anyone who wants to connect will be entirely beholden to get the latest published version from Bluesky" is just the definition of a standard. Every standard is maintained by someone. And its also not EEE to make an entirely new system. They are neither embracing nor extending activitypub. They are trying something of their own.

What do you mean it's not intended to be an open protocol? There is no other reason for it to exist

It will be federated, but not with activitypub. It looks like they're developing a more comprehensive system for federation

I've tried most of the apps, none of them really feel right to me unfortunately. Luckily this issue is just a bug with 0.18.0

Usernames are only unique within servers, just like with email addresses. there's only one john@gmail.com but john@yahoo.com is a different person

Then there should be a single unified sign up page that sends you to a random instance or something. You still need an easy onboarding process for less technical people

really annoying that they used that name but don't have the domain, lol

I really don't understand how people can't tell, I'm starting to wonder if it's a genetic thing like with cilantro.

Ansible runs on your local machine, but it executes the setup on your (Linux) server remotely via SSH. I'd definitely recommend the Ansible setup, it was the easiest I tried. Are you able to SSH into your server already?