Article by Mike Masnick
Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.
I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.
Really, I swear I saw something the other day claiming otherwise. Ie each instance admin needs to sign a contract or something with bluesky? And hows the account creation is that centralised?
Basically bluesky works with pds’s, that host account data, (i actually host my own), appviews, which manage the post sorting/algorithm and ui, and relays, that sit between the two and make it easier (theyre not strictly necessary, but make At-proto services much faster and more reliable).
Relays are expensive, and so bluesky’s relay is the only real one currently, not because theyre shutting other people out, because a relay is expensive. So currently you kind of have to use bluesky’s servers to use the AT protocol, but thatll change whenever someone has the resources to setup a good relay.