theres almost nothing decentralized about bluesky
Hey now, they’re happy to decentralize the feed management so they don’t have to worry about processing user’s custom feeds themselves!
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?
Ok. I want to host my own Bluesky and interact with the bsky.app instance. How?
The article is all about excuses.
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
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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.)
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.
