Fediverse
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theres almost nothing decentralized about bluesky
Swapping Twitter for New Twitter.
Hey now, they're happy to decentralize the feed management so they don't have to worry about processing user's custom feeds themselves!
Almost nothing decentralized yet…
You can host your own PDS (making it distributed but not decentralized), there is an ability to host a relay but hosting a relay requires mirroring the entire network instead of just subscribed nodes like AP, making it cost prohibitive for communities to organize their own relays on ATProto.
If bluesky is serious about decentralization then they need to make mirroring the entire network optional, allow relays’ firehoses to only to stream the activity from subscribed accounts from their users and federate with relays that don’t mirror the entire network.
Mirroring the entire network is what makes it a friendly experience for newcomers, IMO. In my own Mastodon instance I have to subscribe to a big relay (infosec.social) so that a reasonable proportion of replies from other instances I don’t happen to be happening populates into the feed.
I suppose you could say AP makes this optional, but that seems like a reasonable design choice to diverge on rather than a critical flaw in my opinion.
Mirroring the entire network is what makes it act like Twitter.
I'm not convinced that that's A) something we should want, and B) a fight we can win. Trying to recreate what already exists, using technology that's not really suited for it, feels like an uncanny skeuomorphism to me.
Really good points. I put some thoughts in this comment that I think reflect your concerns too. TL;DR the architectural differences lend suitability to the social differences as well between a Twitter-alike and a more clustered, less homogeneous social feed.
That definitely makes it accessible to newcomers. But costs are going to gatekeep smaller communities from hosting relays as the network scales. There are plenty of obscure conversations happening on the far corners of the network that don’t concern the majority, requiring a full network mirror of this activity just increases cost for minimal perceived benefit.
There does need to be some level of seeding, I think the big push for getting starter packs and the like into Mastodon is an example of that need. At the same time, it’s hard to justify spending the money on extra storage and computer just so I can see posts on furry bluesky or some other niche but highly active community.
That’s a good set of points and I agree. I am starting to think this technical difference reflects underlying social / experiential differences:
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ActivityPub “clumpy” federation (like a region of city-states) where your view of the network is based on who you and others in your instance interact with - interoperability, but not homogeneity of content or interaction
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Atproto “swarm” federation (like a pool of taxis sharing livery, with possibly-but-not-necessarily independent operators), endpoints are exchanging data to compose a single virtual platform out of replaceable interoperating parts - federated but not decentralized, having a primary network (the relay service) holding everyone’s experience together
To me the former feels like it encourages a spirit like original Internet communities (MUDs, BBSs, message boards) while the latter produces that of branded app platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat).
I wonder which billionaire is going to snap up bluesky once they've fattened their crop of highly engaged users
They already owe their livelihoods to Blockchain Capital, and venture capital firm of crypto-bros.
The bait is out and the switch is coming.
I don't really get all the pessimism. Even if folks are right in saying there'll be a bait and switch, this is people moving to a new platform en masse. If Bluesky goes to shit there's more reason to believe users would just move again.
In the meantime, as members of the fediverse, we should be using Bluesky being "decentralized" as a way to ease people into actually decentralized platforms.
Is Bluesky decentralized in any meaningful way? If the company dies, could the service live on?
Define decentralisation
If the company dies, could the service continue?
I can tell you right now nobody's on Bluesky because it's "decentralized" because the evidence is clear, it's not in practice decentralized lol.
This is all a bloody waste of time. I really wish I could just fast-forward two years into the enshittification when everyone realizes they got duped by Big VC. Again.
Ok. I want to host my own Bluesky and interact with the bsky.app instance. How?
The article is all about excuses.
Install it and use it?
Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).
It's very centralized, but it's not that different from what you'd have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.
Though really you shouldn't do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate "microblog" shit because it's designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)
all you have to do is
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host your own PDS, where your account lives, this is easy, I do it myself already.
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host you own appview: the only actually good appview is bsky's, luckily it's open source, unfortunately I do not believe they made it easy to self-host.
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Host a relay, this isn't all that hard, it just needs a real big server (AFAIK it needs a shitton of io throughput), so unless you're very rich it's not too realistic to host this.
So yeah, a PDS is easy to host but the other two parts are a pain, and since the protocol has only been open for a few months, people haven't really done too much.
Frontpage exists, but they haven't made it be able to interact with bsky.Social, although the accounts are shared. I have been told by people involved with that that that's an issue with frontpage's implementation, and not the AT protocol
My guess is Bluesky never intended to be « open » and « federated » and « decentralized « as we understand it
Just a hunch, but I think no decentralised network is going to run ATProto unless someone other than Bluesky forks it and makes the protocol changes that would allow that to be practical. I guess it's possible, in theory?
I've not read much about their protocol yet, is there a proposal somewhere on what changes are needed?
I'm not sure what approach would work. As I understand it, it's designed around the idea that all messages get routed through a monolithic "relay" which needs to see every single event from every user in order for any of them to get routed between the PDS nodes where user data gets stored.
Probably best to just add ActivityPub on top of it, if they really wanted to federate with anyone.
Decentralisation doesn't necessarily come with decentralized technical infrastructure, but its the basis for it. I'm still betting on ActivityPub. Sure social insentives are important, but the most openess will win. Also, Wordpress, Flipboard, Threads already joined ActivityPub, so the ecosystem already is kind of attractive in that direction.