Yep, I’ve been particularly irked with the way people keep calling Bluesky “decentralized”. Simply having multiple servers doesn’t make it decentralized, that’s like saying YouTube is decentralized because they have dozens of CDN centers.
If every endpoint on the network is owned and controlled by a single entity that manages white/blacklists, then it is not decentralized. I’m not sure what you would call it, maybe “pluralized”? Not sure, but definitely not “decentralized”. A decentralized network will have no such authority that controls who can and cannot join it.
This isn’t entirely accurate. Main issue is that this is all very new and moving very fast, so while it’s not fair to call atprotocol completely open it’s not fair to call it centralized either.
Right now you can run a relay independently and you can scrape bluesky’s PDS set with it (guy did that in July and it cost about 150 bucks a month, probably more expensive now. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y) there’s just not much incentive to do so. This recent policing of accounts might change the calculus on that thought process, but for now it’s not really that you “can’t” it just nobody really wants to. (Additionally there’s only like one client that lets you set multiple relays and/or appviews, so the front-ends haven’t caught up with this idea either.)
They are VC-Funded, they will inevitably screw over everyone!
I understand where this notion might come from, though, ATproto has already matured enough that it could be used without BlueSky PBC existing.
It could die tomorrow, and with little effort the ~650 non-bsky PDSs and a relay (which would have to handle much less data at that point) could be ran by volunteers and interested people.
It’s federated in name only. It would cost millions in storage and networking to set up another Bluesky node because each node is essentially a full mirror (not that you couldn’t code custom filters or something I’d guess?).
No one is ever going to bother unless conservatives want to set up their own server where they can’t be banned for trolling.
Yep, I’ve been particularly irked with the way people keep calling Bluesky “decentralized”. Simply having multiple servers doesn’t make it decentralized, that’s like saying YouTube is decentralized because they have dozens of CDN centers.
If every endpoint on the network is owned and controlled by a single entity that manages white/blacklists, then it is not decentralized. I’m not sure what you would call it, maybe “pluralized”? Not sure, but definitely not “decentralized”. A decentralized network will have no such authority that controls who can and cannot join it.
This isn’t entirely accurate. Main issue is that this is all very new and moving very fast, so while it’s not fair to call atprotocol completely open it’s not fair to call it centralized either.
Right now you can run a relay independently and you can scrape bluesky’s PDS set with it (guy did that in July and it cost about 150 bucks a month, probably more expensive now. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y) there’s just not much incentive to do so. This recent policing of accounts might change the calculus on that thought process, but for now it’s not really that you “can’t” it just nobody really wants to. (Additionally there’s only like one client that lets you set multiple relays and/or appviews, so the front-ends haven’t caught up with this idea either.)
Theres about 760 or so independent PDSs right now: https://blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdses and the list is growing.
You can host an independent blog using your own PDS and not even using bluesky’s Relay network at all: https://github.com/haileyok/blug
Or you can still have your data independent on your PDS but still allow the relay to scrape your blog update mentions: https://whtwnd.com/
More detailed is here: https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i
tl;Dr:
Distributed is the term, and to be more precise - it’s not federated because ownership and control is not distributed, even if the servers are
It’s federated in name only. It would cost millions in storage and networking to set up another Bluesky node because each node is essentially a full mirror (not that you couldn’t code custom filters or something I’d guess?).
No one is ever going to bother unless conservatives want to set up their own server where they can’t be banned for trolling.
they couldnt anyway, because bluesky wont release the relay code or interact with foreign relays. theres nothing federating or decentralized about it.
e. i love their answer when you call them out on it… its ‘but our design takes too many resources to federate! but someday, we will release the code!’
So it’s basically as federated as a fediverse server with federation turned off lmao
And that’s basically what Truth Social actually is, and no one claims that Trump’s server is federated.
The relay code is here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo/tree/main/cmd/bigsky
And according to this you can host everything except “AppView”: https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q