I didn’t even realize that decentralization was a selling point for Bluesky. I genuinely thought it was just Twitter but not run by Elon Musk
That is by design. From a user’s perspective, the only indication that Bluesky is
decentralizedfederated is the option to select a different “hosting provider” when logging in.
Who cares. It’s inherently a shit platform like Twitter. No one cares about your pithy half sentences.
No.
The distinction is important, and every useful idiot pivoting from one corporate platform to another should be educated on their mistake.
Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it’s own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: https://mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It’s the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
well bluesky is not owned by a normal corporation, but i’d say the problem is it’s supposed to be decentralized, that’s it’s entire point and purpose….
so if it’s not, then that’s problematic….
it’s still fairly new so maybe they want everything perfect before they start federating?
the split between Ruby version 1.8 and 1.9 was huge and seriously hindered it’s growth….
i have hope for Bluesky and the AT protocol… but not a ton of hope.Luckily, there’s non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
I agree with your overall point, but Wikipedia has a singular mission. Social settings can have wildy different missions from shitposting, to hobbies, study groups, to support groups, etc. There is no singular moderation ethos that can apply to all of them, that’s why decentralization is important in social media.
We want to algorithms to work for the people, not have people slaving for the algorithms.
Of course I agree that decentralization for social media is hugely important. I’m just pointing out that there can exist use cases where centralization makes sense and/or is not a problem.
Absolutely I was not trying to take away from your point! Cory Doctorow actually recently wrote a good piece on Wikipedia that you reminded me of.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn’t mean “walled off”.
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn’t that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a “main and central” repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn’t centralized. It’s distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
- Read the source code
- Modify the source code
- Distribute the source code
- Distribute your modifications to the source code
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don’t think that makes it “decentralized” it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren’t parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
More importantly it’s for-profit capitalist crap? With ethical and moral considerations, there is no reason to push this when there are alternatives with much better starting blocks.
It’s a benefit corporation which means the board has to consider the benefit to society, employees, etc.
There is no argument. It’s centralised.
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are ‘open-source’ even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren’t truly open-source, and I stand by that).
The storage requirements aren’t an issue anymore.
You can self host everything for around ~$34 a month.@gabboman@app.wafrn.net runs an alternate bluesky instance (kinda) and he’s not bankrupt yet. Hell, it was on a free oracle server for a while.
but can I use a random old computer I have in my house to run an instance as long as there are a managable number of users? renting a server isnt self hosting. making one yourself is self hosting.
can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i’ve seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one’s saying what exactly is or has changed
Fediverse Reports regularly talks about updates with ATProto, and I found this blog post mentioned in another blog post from WeDistribute.
The most interesting development as of late is the progress of Blacksky. It is the first major attempt at creating an independent “Bluesky Instance”–where in that it’s functionally the same as Bluesky but doesn’t rely on any of Bluesky’s infrastructure.
There is also Wafrn, which is really hard to explain. @gabboman@app.wafrn.net is in this thread somewhere and will have to explain it.
Not really that hard to explain, unless I’m missing your point. Wafrn is a federated Tumblr-like platform that allows two-way interaction with Bluesky users (without the need for bridging).
There’s way more to Wafrn than that, and it’s extremely interesting.
You can treat Wafrn like an independent ATProto platform (like Blacksky). It has its own PDS and AppView (which uses Blacksky’s Relay), so it’s not at all dependent on Bluesky for obtaining posts (assuming those posts are also published on an independent PDS).
What’s unique is that Wafrn is actually ActivityPub-first, meaning it doesn’t have any issue interacting with Mastodon users, but doesn’t have all the same features of a normal ATProto platform. For example must have your account on Wafrn in order to use it (as opposed to blacksky.community, which lets you sign in with an existing account on another ATProto platform); you can, however, sign into bsky.app (or blacksky) with an account created on Wafrn.
thank you!
Cmo, what so bad with
furrysky…BLUE! I mean Bluesky 😰.
I kinda wonder… Is Bluesky’s creator(s) furry? 🤔
The furry community was pushing to switch to it from other platforms almost as soon as the site started up.
Yes, as soon as 99%+ of the users aren’t on the same server. That’s the bottom line. We can argue theory all day but it doesn’t change the implications of centralization.
Alternate ATP servers:
- altq.net: PDS
- app.wafrn.net: pds and appview
- atproto.africa: alt relay
- zeppelin.social: alt appview
- blacksky.app: alternate PDS
- blacksky.community: alternate appview
- witchcraft.systems: alt pds
- sprk.so: alt pds, plans on hosting an appview
- gander.social: canadian PDS, appview in plans
- arankwende.com: open-signup PDS
- atproto.hotwaru.com: open-signup PDS
- bsky.aenead.net: open-signup PDS
- casjay.social: open-signup PDs
- deer.social: alt-client
Honourable mention to AppViewLite which lets you easily and cheaply host an appview yourself. I can run it on my laptop easily. It doesn’t depend on relays, it can crawls PDSes directly.
Plus the many other instances here: https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping
Thanks!
99% isn’t the threshold. I’d say like 25% or less
Doesn’t LW control ~30% of the lemmyverse?
Lemmyverse != threadiverse
It controls ~30% of the threadiverse, then.
Where is that number coming from?
My head. Lemmy.world has 15,000 (roughly) monthly active users, the threadiverse has roughly 60,000 active users,
So 25%
Well 25% is very strict, pretty sure mastodon.social is more than that for the Fediverse
But yea anything higher than 75% is kinda missing the point, ideally if anyone hit 50% they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternatives instead lol
join-lemmy.org actually hides any instance of 30% of Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/shared/components/instances.tsx#L451-L456
ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternatives instead
Is that what you would actually expect Bluesky to do if they were committed to decentralization?
I said “ideally”, but they probably would’ve done a lot of things differently if they were committed to decentralization
Is anyone arguing at this point?
It’s not decentralized. There’s no argument.
It is decentralised.
Check: blacksky.community, atproto.africa, altq.net, app.wafrn.net and zeppelin.social.
I’ve seen people arguing. On Mastodon, weirdly enough.
I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.
Hey, the at protocol is pretty simple really.
Essentially, the network has three main parts:
- PDSes: These are “dumb” data stores. The do not do anything except store data and handle authentication. Your account “lives” on them, but you can migrate between them seamlessly, and keep your data when you migrate.
- Relays: These connect to PDSes over websocket and store all the data from them. They provide a “firehose” of data through websockets. The advantage of relays is that there is far less missing information than on the fediverse.
- AppViews: These connect to relays and take the posts. They sort through the data and only keep what is relevant for them.
For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have anapp.bsky.*nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones withfyi.frontpage.*nsids, and that are too long.
This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren’t necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
The cost in running relays has also dropped. It’s roughly $34 a month. Read this article by a bluesky dev: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.
I’m not going to deny that most people using bluesky’s servers is a problem, because it is.Jack Dorsey wasn’t very involved in bluesky, and isn’t involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it’s decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don’t really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
Thats the article? What? Its just a big nothing burger
I want all my greens on Mastodon instead of Bluesky.
there is blacksky and others which are making app for atprotocol soo its decentralized
What does that enable? Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?
People with bsky.social accounts can evade the bans by using: deer.social, zeppelin.social and blacksky.community, without even having to migrate their accounts.
Could people in states blocked by the main network use it through these?
Yes, and they wouldn’t even need to migrate their accounts to do so (although they probably should).
