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I will continue to point it out as long as people keep recommending it. Its not a minor complaint or a small point of disagreement, its a complete deal breaker that makes the platform worthless to invest any time in. No matter how much time passes it will always be a shit platform as long as its centralized.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here...
If you don't want to hear any criticism, stop bringing up pseudo-decentralized corpo VC-backed Twitter 2.0
:3
what about matrix , they also do business
There is a difference between providing services to fund development and "We take VC capital now and try to make it profitable later", which just invites enshittification.
Also Matrix is much better federated than BS + everything is open and was so for a long time
Slightly better you mean. 30% is on matrix.org and an estimated 70% runs on servers provided by EMS (this figure includes matrix.org).
And Matrix is also VC funded. They have some other income yes, but it is insufficient to fund many of their current activities. As a result enshittification is already happening.
Matrix is basically the Bluesky of chat. If you want an Fediverse equivalent have a look at XMPP/Jabber.
Matrix.org is VC funded (which is why it will go freemium soon AFAIK) and not 99% is on Matrix.org as you mentioned
I can freely and easily federate with any other homeserver to matrix.org
Don't let them distract with with the "whattabout matrix". The Matrix Foundation is not a social media company, and furthermore it's a nonprofit.
Matrix has a profitable business model that doesn't involve exploiting users. BlueSky doesn't.
Author: points out how Bluesky is not decentralized.
Also Author: only points out how people are arguing about how Bluesky is decentralized.
Author: Mission Accomplished.
There is no argument. It's centralised.
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:
app.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 with fyi.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.
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.
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.
Luckily, there's non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
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.
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.
Over the last few weeks hundreds of people have moved their accounts to the new blacksky.app PDS, and they're running an early version of their app at blacksky.community
I've spent...quite a bit of time intentionally looking for alternative ATP servers and this is the first time I've heard of this. And I'm balls deep in this stuff. I even run my own AP server. So I'd say it's so obscure as to be meaningless.
99.99% of the users are still on infrastructure run by Bluesky PBC...but looking at all the progress and activity, it sure seems to me that's in the process of changing.
My guy. LOL. No. Just no. It isn't.
so many people in the Fediverse present the fact that 99.99% of Bluesky users are still using infrastructrure run by Bluesky PBC as if it's a gotcha
I mean...yeah? It is.
They just prefer to invest their time and energy in working to improve the situation
And we prefer to invest our time and energy into supporting an actually decentralized protocol.
rather than arguing about the semantics of "decentralization."
At what point was anyone arguing semantics?
So can we please stop arguing about this already?
Yes, please, go ahead.
Alternate ATP servers:
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
Well 25% is very strict, pretty sure mastodon.social is more than that for the Fediverse (I do wish other instances would grow faster to catch up)
But yea anything higher than 50% is kinda missing the point, ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternative instances instead
Majority share is too powerful
join-lemmy.org actually hides any instance that's over 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
Since we have Mississippi as an example... Why not just look how it turned out for the people there? Do or don't they have a communications platform now that connects them to a network of other people? I feel that's way more helpful than discussing what should be discussed, or talking about theoretical details.
If they use deer.social or zeppelin.social (alternate bluesky instances), they can evade the bans and blocks.
Ah, thanks. And are those people then connected to the same network and can follow each other, or are those entirely seperate? Pardon my lack of knowledge about Bluesky and ATProto.
Bluesky's network has 2 main layers, the PDS layer, and the appview layer.
Everyone's PDS stores their posts, likes and account, and handles authentication.
It doesn't do anything else. an appview gathers posts from PDSes, and indexes and sorts them (for feeds and notifications).
AppViews all share the same posts, so they're in the same network.
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.
thank you!
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.
I want all my greens on Mastodon instead of Bluesky.
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
You are correct. The term is called "openwashing". Now and then bluesky ~~employees~~ cultists will come on Lemmy and mastodon and try to LARP that their for-profit company has our best interests in mind.
Who cares. It's inherently a shit platform like Twitter. No one cares about your pithy half sentences.
I have no idea what this means or what Bluesky is, so yes. I'm happy to continue not knowing or talking about it.
Thats the article? What? Its just a big nothing burger