Valid question, but Americans in particular are easily swayed by the fact that the corporate ownership is listed as a "Public Benefit Corporation." Bluesky is a PBC and for most people that's enough "proof" that they will "be for the public good."

In that it is set up to "benefit the public good" people just... buy into that, even if the company isn't actually benefitting the public good.

Look at how long it took for people to wise up that the Susan G. Komen foundation was spending most of its money on their CEOs and ads and very little on actually helping people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Pinkwashing

For the general public, Open Source generally means "difficult to set up and use with bad user interface."

And yes, the whole self-hosting thing with numerous servers is confusing to people who have never had to step outside of the corporate-dominated internet.

All that is self-evident based on the original reddit exodus to here on Lemmy. The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light. They're just far too used to private company doing all that "for free" (*cough for all your private data cough) and struggle to understand how the different way it is set up means you don't get all the fancy features from the get-go.

So people saw an option with corporate sponsorship and money behind it, and they leap to that. Also I'm sure Bluesky is investing in advertising their product, which is competing with zero advertising dollars spend on the no-corporate fediverse.