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…
it’s not centralized
go to https://reddwarf.whey.party/ and all requests will be made to Constellation (a hobby project which tracks backlinks of records, which is completely independent of Bluesky PBC), the PDSes directly, and Bluesky’s CDN (which is negligible since a CDN can be an easy replacement on a small scale)
99.99% of users on bluesky.social = centralized no matter what cute little toys people built on the side
Yes, but that can (and probably will) change, especially if people start using instances like those soon.
No it wont. And you know it wont. People chose bluesky because of its centralized nature, not despite it.
No, they chose bsky because it works well and is an alternative to twitter, idk why anyone would choose againsy a decentralised platform.
Its works well for normies because it is centralized. Every time you see non nerds discuss the lack of widespread fediverse adoption the main reason is “picking a server is intimidating”. 90% of bluesky users (probably more) have never heard of the fediverse or know what “decentralized” even means. They picked it because it was easy and because the centralized moderation seemed more trustworthy than the one on twitter.
Literally the whole point of bluesky is to try to make a platform that is decentralized and that people will flock to even if they’re normies. To catch the twitter wave they did the second part before the first. Eventually other companies will pop up that use ATproto and normies will grow to understand that they’re federated.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
There are four other posts about Bluesky or ATProto on the front page of !fediverse@lemmy.world (when viewed from lemmy.zip), so I guessed otherwise.
I think the sidebar clarifies it pretty well
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub
Yeah and “but other people are doing it” is not a valid excuse lol
That is exactly what I meant, just because other people are doing it too, it doesn’t stop you from reading the sidebar
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
I can freely and easily federate with *.bsky.network and bsky.app.
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.
may I ask how users are being exploited at this current moment?
They’re not, to my knowledge, but also, to my knowledge, they have no plan for profitability. They’re a domain registrar and they sell merch but there’s no way that’s paying for all that infra for 12M users.
They’re planning on offering a subscription at some point that will basically just be discord nitro.
Uh-huh, and we see how that turned out…
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.
There is no argument. It’s centralised.
Explain blacksky and wafrn
Classic whattaboutism from bluesky cultists:
https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Please continue to deflect and avoid the topic.
Because bsky has tons of users, and the ATmosphere is only recently “truly” decentralized. You can argue it is federated, but centralized, but acting as if it’s not decentralized/federated at all is stupid.
and the ATmosphere is only recently “truly” decentralized
It’s absolutely not. There is no situation in which 99.999% of users on a single for profit platform can be accurately called decentralized.
Similarly, “federated” means jack shit when the only thing the for profit bluesky company is federated with are two micro-instances that are fully reliant on the for profit Bluesky company.
How are they completely reliant of the bluesky company?
If bluesky shut down tommorow they would still work, and while bluesky is currently the majority of users, it won’t be forever. If you give it a bit of time, other instances with many users will pop up.
Like, my whole argument is that you can’t write off a actually decentralized platform completely just because it’s currently centered on one large instance.
actually decentralized
currently centered on one large instance.
You are not behaving rationally.
Okay I think we disagree on semantics.
I think decentralized = anyone can set up their own instance that doesn’t depend on any other instance.
is matrix decentralized?
lol exactly how many whataboutisms do you have to do to earn your btc?
In case anyone else is reading this, Matrix is an encrypted messaging protocol developed by a nonprofit. So by attempting to compare that to a for profit social media company, /u/gabboman is trying to sidestep the reason why decentralization is important in social media apps.
… what?
you’re a paid actor paid by jack dorsey to promote bluesky. that’s obviously the best explanation to why you’re invested in this
why else would someone behave in such a shameful and embarassing manner
Don’t waste your time on a feddit.uk user.
what is your instance
Their instance is app.wafrn.net ;)
Jokes aside, wafrn is a cool tumblr-like fediverse service. It has bluesky support, so it acts as another instance of bluesky.
Interesting. How well does it work?
It works extremely well, I can follow bluesky users and interact with them as if they were on the fediverse.
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.
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.
- “for profit”? how?
- “super complicated” it’s really not, just nobody on the Fediverse wants to spend 2 seconds looking into it to realize it’s pros and cons over the Fediverse.
- “steal all the talking points of the fediverse” you sound hostile af
its not crazy to suggest that the crypto bros running bluesky would openwash their true intentions
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.
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.
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.
You can download all of bluesky easily through the firehose, and it is federated.
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.
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.
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:
- 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.socialhttps://gandersocial.ca/ : 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
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
Bluesky traded good user distribution for growth.
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%
15.5/36.3 is 43%
Data from Lemmy.world sidebar and fedidb.com
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.
Yeah
Yes, you can.
You can easily run a PDS, that’s the main public-facing part, you’d need port forwarding and a domain name for this.
Appviews are easier to host imo, https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite is what I use. You can run this on a PC right now, and log in with your bluesky account.thats not a whole instance though. thats just a place for an account to be. on activity pub platforms anyone can just make an entire indepent and independently functional instance of the platform.
Have you even looked at wafrn
Doesn’t seem like they did. Sorry for all the negativity you are facing in this thread, thank you for your work on wafrn.
Its ok no worries
Fedi people looses it with atproto
Let’s start to argue about important things, like why ATProto has a 300 character limit!
but why would you want your account tied to a specific software and index
???
The PDS and the Appview combined are equivalent to an instance. Both run on shitware.The thing is, there are no instances in ATProto. Instances are an ActivityPub thing.
There are PDS + Appviews + relays. All three aspects are self-hostable and can be combined in any way. The appview you use is not limited by your PDS (while in AP the type of instance you run very much limits the number of fronteds and clients you can use), nor is your relay.
A person could selfhost their own pds, use the blacksky relay and the deer.social appview, to give an example.
Also: you can easily self host an appview (check appviewlite), and you can set it to crawl PDSes directly, instead of using a relay.
No, you can’t. You can have a custom domain (“PDS” is the term they invented for this) but it still relies on bluesky’s servers.
this is literally the exact same for the fediverse. it is near impossible to own your data. if you want to own your data, you have to own others’ data, and you’re practically isolated in a black box unless you spam hashtags and spam follow people.
big instances still have a massive control over the entirety of the fediverse for whatever category (e.g. micro-blogging) they are in
but I could still easily make my own instance and be outside of that influence.
app.wafrn.net. Alt-atproto server, outside of bluesky’s control.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
No.
The distinction is important, and every useful idiot pivoting from one corporate platform to another should be educated on their mistake.
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
employeescultists will come on Lemmy and mastodon and try to LARP that their for-profit company has our best interests in mind.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.
