10 ms·

Bluesky Is Not Decentralized

218 points by pabs3 2y ago

immibis 2y ago
Glad this information is finally going mainstream. BlueSky users used to tell everyone it was more decentralized than Mastodon because of this DID thing.
pfraze 2y ago
Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email. We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network. For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.
- rsolva 2y ago
  The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
  - brianolson 2y ago
    If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
  - pfraze 2y ago
    If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications https://atproto.com/guides/applications If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social https://github.com/bluesky-social.
    - rsolva 2y ago
      Thanks, it's been a while since I last looked into it. Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?
      - pfraze 2y ago
        Yep!
        yewey 2y ago
        and will a bunch of hostile feminists be able to place derogatory "labels" on my self hosted account or put me on nasty and rudely named lists branding me a right winger or a transmysoginist or whatever like they currently do on bluesky?
        slater 2y ago
        If you are any of those things, it doesn't hurt to warn others! hth
        stjacobs 2y ago
        [dead]
        afiori 2y ago
        My understanding is that users and third-parties can offer various moderation services that users can subscribe to. So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow
- deleted 2y ago
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- IoI_xD 2y ago
  > We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad (which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
  - arromatic 2y ago
    You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
    - dbspin 2y ago
      Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At the same time (2005 - 2012) Twitter was an incredible resource for real time news and reactions to what was happening. Without clickbait, commercial promotion or flame (culture) wars. The web pre-agorithm was gradually being subsumed by feed readers like Google Reader, where you'd browse longform articles and blog posts from people you'd found or been recommended by friends. There was no shortage of content. What was absent was 'brainrot', engagement bait, and all the vapid fluff that the 'algorithms' (tweaked entirely and completely to maximise engagement and advertising consumption - not to your preference) provide.
      - lukan 2y ago
        To quote the sibling content: "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm." Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads" I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.
- kristo 2y ago
  I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it. These people are just winging for followers IMO.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I mean, I very much desire the ‘not crypto’ part of that. All the rest is optional. Facebook is better than crypto.
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    A social network that’s not controlled by, or potentially controlled by a billionaire. The traits required to become a billionaire are not the traits required to run a social network. This should be obvious by now. Zaphod Beeblebrox had no actual power for a reason.
  - meibo 2y ago
    I think you just described the fediverse. The naysayers want you use to use the fediverse instead of centralized crypto stuff.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    Bro you literally just described Mastodon.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- Matl 2y ago
  To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
- Matl 2y ago
  > For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
  - dartos 2y ago
    I central authority with escape hatches is okay, I think. One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority. As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
    - Matl 2y ago
      The problem being that once that single authority becomes 'the standard' getting anyone to switch/use any alternative becomes almost impossible There are many alternatives to (ICANN) DNS, but since none have support built into major browsers, they end up being a pain to use, which hampers adoption. The most successful is probably the Onion network and that's far from mainstream.
      - dartos 2y ago
        I don’t think there’s a way to avoid that kind of zipf curve when it comes to “mainstream” as it’s rarely the technical merits that makes something mainstream. The network effect is very strong. It’s usually the force of large, powerful (or early) organizations. Realistically I’m okay with a single overwhelming popular entity as long as I, as an individual, can choose have my alternative.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
- Orthographic 2y ago
  (I've updated this post as I've learned more). Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky). If I understand Bluesky correctly: When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc). You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry. And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me. Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it. My questions are: 1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure? 2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)? 3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention: 1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently. 2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it. 3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Thanks Paul & all. I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining, https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base. Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
- evbogue 2y ago
  Yes, of course Bluesky is federated. The hosts hold onto your keypairs. The DID:PLC is a substring of your first hash. For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/ https://scuttlebot.io/ Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
  - selecsosi 2y ago
    Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
    - evbogue 2y ago
      Thanks! I'm well. Yes, Scuttlebot's offline-firstness and the friend of a friend replication strategy were ahead of their time.
colesantiago 2y ago
Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.
- pfraze 2y ago
  I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
- threeseed 2y ago
  Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users. Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad. https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com https://mastodon-analytics.com
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Dunno, this account[0] says Mastodon has 15.5m users, says it pulls from https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ .. no clue how reliable/accurate their data is though. [0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/113270983367781353 https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    Bluesky has 1.43M daily active users on average and 6M monthly actives. https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d... Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower. Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.
bowsamic 2y ago
I'm not really sure what the benefit of BS over Mastodon is anyway. Everyone interesting is on Mastodon
- deleted 2y ago
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- rsynnott 2y ago
  Bluesky’s more accessible to the general public. I’m on both, though use Mastodon more (partially due to _far_ better third party clients available); it’s a very different crowd.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    How would you describe Bluesky's crowd vs. Mastodon? I found the latter great for finding interesting developers, musicians, artists, etc. My X is full of people having constant meltdowns or who are just always fighting others, no one really sharing anything interesting. Haven't tried bluesky bc it was invite only (I assume it isn't anymore if you say it's accessible) and I didn't really care enough to ask for one from someone.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      bsky is open to anyone, and has been for a while now, that’s correct.
- jacooper 2y ago
  Sure, if you don't care about sports, news, anything other than tech. Bluesky literally just started and it already covers more things than mastodon ever did while providing a better UX without stupid technical limitations like not implementing global full text search.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    Are there artists and musicians on bluesky, or just programmers?
threeseed 2y ago
Not sure how it is better than Threads. At least Meta is delivering on their promise to integrate with Mastodon and move us closer to decentralised social networks.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  I mean, Meta’s ActivityPub integration is one-way on public profiles. I think even Facebook used to allow you to get RSS feeds of your friends’ updates in the early days. Threads’s lip-service towards AP is barely better than that.
- pfraze 2y ago
  Bluesky integrates with Mastodon better than Threads does at this point. I have bidirectional conversations with mastodon users, with notifications, using a bridge called BridgyFed. I can follow Mastodon users on Bluesky. I can’t with Threads.
  - maelito 2y ago
    How seamless is it ? Any daily problems ? Can you show a link to a conversation made this way ?
    - jamesmunns 2y ago
      I bridged my bluesky account, if you're on mastodon and want to talk to me here, you're welcome to. Not sure if you need to opt-in on the mastodon side to be bridged to bluesky. @jamesmunns.com@bsky.brid.gy I think you can opt-in here? https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/jamesmunns.com/followers https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/jamesmunns.com/followers
- timeon 2y ago
  I have hard time believing Meta since both Facebook and Instagram are not open to public. But time will tell.
udev4096 2y ago
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jeroenhd 2y ago
Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever. Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.
- exodust 2y ago
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  - threeseed 2y ago
    I just tried signing up for X using a new account. 99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc. Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.
    - exodust 2y ago
      "99%"... sure. So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention. Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information trolls, intifada-fascists, take your pick! I remember back when Trump was president, every single post he made on Twitter had a torrent of abusive replies bubbling to the top. Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government were met with endless insult-memes. Surely you don't think Twitter was once a place where inflammatory posts were rare and everyone had good manners?
      - 2y ago
its-summertime 2y ago
> BlueSky's big claim is [they have] "no algorithm". https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite > But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request. AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky > And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital. And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case. - - - A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.
- pxoe 2y ago
  what does have a "big claim" that they have "no algorithm" is mastodon, which says so on its joinmastodon.org page and in its instance blurb. which just so obviously could not even possibly be true.
  - cuu508 2y ago
    The news feed in Mastodon is chronologic, it includes all posts from the accounts you follow (and have not muted).
    - Kye 2y ago
      Chronological sorting is an algorithm. You don't hear its dissenters as much, but it's not without issue. It's not always the best way to present things.
      - j_maffe 2y ago
        Repeating my comment here because some people are deliberately stick manning this argument: > In the context of social media, people mean highly optimized algorithms for maximum retention.
blitzar 2y ago
Still waiting for my day 1 request to be considered for membership to come through. Don't think I made the cut.
- paulgb 2y ago
  You can just sign up now, you don’t need an invite.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Its ok, they have my details. I am sure they will let me know when it is time.
    - pfraze 2y ago
      I personally and formally invite you to join. Im sure your original invite got lost in the mail. Fwiw the invites were really just to manage scale. We weren’t ready yet and demand was high. We weren’t trying to exclude people
      - dredds 2y ago
        A reservation queue would have worked just as well. (first in first served) The invite system sets up existing hierarchy of insiders and outsiders from the get-go, favoring the already popular, and creating a wall for new (single) users perhaps not in the hot geolocations where invites get handed out in bulk. It actually excludes people who are already struggling to socialize, and rewards those who have all the 'right connections'.
        pfraze 2y ago
        We did both. I don’t know why the invite didn’t reach their email
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maxlin 2y ago
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- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, Twitter itself borrowed most of its concepts from either the user base (@ mentions, replies, retweets, quote tweets were all informal behaviours before they were features) or other social media platforms, particularly Tumblr. It is very much a field where doing it well beats being the first. Of course, if you’re earlier you have network effects, but Carface seems doggedly determined to compensate by driving the existing network away.
  - maxlin 2y ago
    I don't disagree but that's not my point. The point is, there's little reason to go to the clones, you just lose the network effects, as X is still clearly "the" place to post stuff, and where your identity is the strongest. Which is important given in actuality it's not such a walled garden with authoritarian rule throwing people out like Twitter was. Only when everyone can have their say, you end up with something that ACTUALLY represents the "town square". Blue Sky might also be the town square, but more akin to one of a closed soviet military town.
pxoe 2y ago
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing promise when it literally just does not work that way in some aspects. You're still "centralized" to whatever server you signed up on, still with caveats that an actual centralized service would have. It's better, but it's truly not all it's made out to be. Definitely not to the point where such sneer and kind of just, speculatively making shit up, wouldn't look just ironic.
- rtpg 2y ago
  "Being at will of a server" is always a problem, but with federation you can choose which server you are at the will of. You still need trust, but that trust can be chosen by you based off of your needs (and that trust can be placed in yourself). You're on a different part of the trust gradient. Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    And the federation also made the spam email problem a lot worse ;-) Anyhow, federation should be seen as a part of specific strategy for decentralization; federation itself is not decentralization and cannot achieve it without more bits---like topological consideration. Many federated protocols tend to push those bits into the horizon and fail at scale when that horizon eventually approaches, while ATProto is at least explicitly constructed with eventual decentralization in the mind and seems to be fine for now. Mastodon will need to prove much more than ATProto in order to show that it's capable for eventual decentralization in contrast.
    - davexunit 2y ago
gr__or 2y ago
I think there is an interesting piece to be written about how prone bsky is to being captured by a single entity. It would look at how the reality of PDS today is 99.9999% (not the actual number, but ballpark) bsky hosted, also true for the relay. Then it would outline EEE scenarios, their likelihoods and whether bksy is sufficiently decentralized to fend them off. This post is not that and misses the mark for me.
benreesman 2y ago
It’s hard to imagine any upper bound on broken or useless or corrupt that would invalidate one more news feed. The gates are open on Google Search shaping your information, on Meta shaping your fashion, on Amazon shaping your commercial instinct. And on YC boosting tired legacies around AirBnB rather than contemporary realities like Garry “Die Motherfucker” Tan pimping Pear “ChatGPT that license” shit on X. I’ve had a beer with Zuckerberg and one with Dorsey, I say it can’t get any worse.
moffkalast 2y ago
I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services. Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.
- bbor 2y ago
  I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck. https://slrpnk.net https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax. So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
- timeon 2y ago
  > wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that. But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    I would go out on a limb and postulate that most people prefer lots of meaningless content. At least if the popularity of Tiktok is anything to go buy.
scirob 2y ago
People on mastodon are so toxic. I tried to contribute code and content was threatened with lawsuits by people who don't understand that their protocol is explicitly designed for open data
- cuu508 2y ago
  Can you share a link to where this happened?
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34400143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34400143
openrisk 2y ago
It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post. > And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? Yet that is the only thing that matters. The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome. What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice. The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals. The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).
- alexch 2y ago
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dangsux 2y ago
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badrequest 2y ago
This is a ludicrous paranoid screed that, thanks to the nature of Mastodon, will not be on the live internet in a decade's time.
ck2 2y ago
People are going to nit-pic and while some of the concerns have some weight to them, so far they are trivial IMHO The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%) And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons. So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better. The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Bluesky, being by Twitter founders, isn't that much better in this sense than Threads/Facebook/Meta. And the biggest issue with Xitter still isn't Elon Musk (have you forgotten the "Trump years" already ?), but because the way how that media works is turning discussions into flamewars, and its users into morons (including Musk, who reportedly was hooked on it long before he bought it). It's especially concerning when journalists (who really should know better) and politicians use it. That blame lies very much on Twitter's founders.
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avinassh 2y ago
related: any high level architecture details on how BlueSky uses SQLite per user?
- deleted 2y ago
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- Natanael_L 2y ago
  It's used in a not particularly advanced way - bluesky uses repositories per each user for all their public social activity (posts, likes, etc) and it creates a Merkle tree as an index for them and signs that index (this enables stuff like authenticated content addressing and efficient verification). SQLite simply stores those posts and that signed Merkle tree. The PDS account host server also has another SQLite DB with a list of its accounts. They have fancier stuff in their appview server and relay server
jrm4 2y ago
Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me. Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations. This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds. It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel. What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?
- relaxing 2y ago
  > What is the advantage of bluesky here? Fewer Nazis.
  - jrm4 2y ago
    Yeah, this is another issue entirely, but also very often wrong and misses the point. Roughly, e.g. -- Twitter (nope not calling it X) is still overwhelmingly the most useful and productive place for Black+US Politics discussion. Despite, or even perhaps because of, the presence of bad guys. The thing I hate the most about Mastodon (despite being the right model) is people trying to make it nice, but end up making it STERILE. The left leaning folks, who politically I generally strongly agree with, really do overdo it in terms of "shutting down disagreeable speech." (Bluesky is similar to Mastodon here)
    - relaxing 2y ago
      What’s some of this disagreeable speech you’ve been shut down on.
      - swed420 2y ago
        Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"
apitman 2y ago
To date decentralization is inversely correlated to good UX. * nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys). * Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything). * Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX. The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.
- StellarStoic 2y ago
  Nostr's poor UX is a feature, not a bug. It serves as a reminder that life isn’t perfect. Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers. What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve. Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw. One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)

218 points by pabs3 2y ago

Glad this information is finally going mainstream. BlueSky users used to tell everyone it was more decentralized than Mastodon because of this DID thing.

pfraze 2y ago

Read this: https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers AT Protocol works like the Web, where each user is a website and each application is a search engine. The apps crawl the network of hosts and aggregate activity. We have over 100 outside hosts and at least 3 aggregating apps out there. It’s a different model than ActivityPub, which is more akin to email. We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. We have an open system for algorithms, which we and 3p devs can operate. We have a default algorithm for every user called Discover. It was one of our main concerns to have an answer to algorithms in a decentralized network. For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. We also support the Web DID method, and if folks like this remain concerned we’re open to other DID methods. It’s important, but roughly similar to DNS or TLS issuers; supporting infra to the application network.

rsolva 2y ago
The OP does not take issue with the algorithm part, but the claim of decentralization. I'm currently running my own instance of an ActivityPub server (GoToSocial), just for me, and it works like a charm. I would not know how to do the same with BlueSky, and I have tried to understand how.
- brianolson 2y ago
  If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
- pfraze 2y ago
  If you’re trying to self host your account, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting If you’re trying to build an application, you follow https://atproto.com/guides/applications https://atproto.com/guides/applications If you’re looking to run the bluesky application, you need to run the codebases in https://github.com/bluesky-social https://github.com/bluesky-social.
  - rsolva 2y ago
    Thanks, it's been a while since I last looked into it. Will my self-hosted account be able to talk directly to other self-hosted BlueSky accounts?
    - pfraze 2y ago
      Yep!
      - yewey 2y ago
        and will a bunch of hostile feminists be able to place derogatory "labels" on my self hosted account or put me on nasty and rudely named lists branding me a right winger or a transmysoginist or whatever like they currently do on bluesky?
        slater 2y ago
        If you are any of those things, it doesn't hurt to warn others! hth
        stjacobs 2y ago
        [dead]
        afiori 2y ago
        My understanding is that users and third-parties can offer various moderation services that users can subscribe to. So anyone can label/mislabel/ban/block anyone else, but everyone can chose whose labels/mislabels/bans/blocks to follow
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
IoI_xD 2y ago
> We never said no algorithm. I don’t know where that meme comes from. It comes from the people who don't know what an algorithm is but heard that Twitter has it and it's making them doomscroll so it's bad (which is not to defend Twitter or other social media's algorithms, but to say that some people seem to have a blind hatred of them entirely due to misconceptions)
- arromatic 2y ago
  You expressed it perfectly in word which i couldn't. People's hate for algorithm is so weird . Without the algorithm they can never find quality or content they are interest in .
  - dbspin 2y ago
    Absolutey rock hard disagree. I'm old enough to remember when twitter and facebook used to both have a chronological feed without algorithmic sorting. Facebook (trash today of course) was an incredibly useful way to find out what your friends were doing on a given day by just reading the chronological feed. You could also trivially see which events were going on in your locality and which friends were attending. At the same time (2005 - 2012) Twitter was an incredible resource for real time news and reactions to what was happening. Without clickbait, commercial promotion or flame (culture) wars. The web pre-agorithm was gradually being subsumed by feed readers like Google Reader, where you'd browse longform articles and blog posts from people you'd found or been recommended by friends. There was no shortage of content. What was absent was 'brainrot', engagement bait, and all the vapid fluff that the 'algorithms' (tweaked entirely and completely to maximise engagement and advertising consumption - not to your preference) provide.
    - lukan 2y ago
      To quote the sibling content: "And to be extra clear, "only show posts from people I follow, in chronological order" is an algorithm." Apparently people understand different things by "algorithm". I also use the general one and not "algorithm" as a special algorithm that tries to find things I might like based on my past interactions, but mainly tailored to keep my engagement high so I watch more ads" I would like the possibility of creating and tweaking my own algorithm for my feed.
kristo 2y ago
I don’t understand what the naysayers want? They want an app that is decentralized, completely free, uses nothing remotely related to crypto, doesn’t serve ads, and where it starts day 1 with a robust ecosystem of applications using it. These people are just winging for followers IMO.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I mean, I very much desire the ‘not crypto’ part of that. All the rest is optional. Facebook is better than crypto.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  A social network that’s not controlled by, or potentially controlled by a billionaire. The traits required to become a billionaire are not the traits required to run a social network. This should be obvious by now. Zaphod Beeblebrox had no actual power for a reason.
- meibo 2y ago
  I think you just described the fediverse. The naysayers want you use to use the fediverse instead of centralized crypto stuff.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  Bro you literally just described Mastodon.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Matl 2y ago
To me the biggest problem with ATProto is to discover the current location of a user, you query https://web.plc.directory/resolve https://web.plc.directory/resolve which is a centralized service Second biggest is that while a PDS does decentralize the data, I belive bsky.app is still the place providing the 'frontend' that makes it all work.
Matl 2y ago
> For DID PLC, the likely solution is to move the registry into a nonprofit which will maintain it, similar to ICANN. ICANN is rather centralized. This is the biggest concern I have with ATProto, I would have expected it to work over P2P i.e. IPNS, or even some sort of a blockchain rather than a centralized web server.
- dartos 2y ago
  I central authority with escape hatches is okay, I think. One could start their own DNS server with different records than the ICANN ones, thus ignoring their authority. As long as that possibility exists, it’s fine.
  - Matl 2y ago
    The problem being that once that single authority becomes 'the standard' getting anyone to switch/use any alternative becomes almost impossible There are many alternatives to (ICANN) DNS, but since none have support built into major browsers, they end up being a pain to use, which hampers adoption. The most successful is probably the Onion network and that's far from mainstream.
    - dartos 2y ago
      I don’t think there’s a way to avoid that kind of zipf curve when it comes to “mainstream” as it’s rarely the technical merits that makes something mainstream. The network effect is very strong. It’s usually the force of large, powerful (or early) organizations. Realistically I’m okay with a single overwhelming popular entity as long as I, as an individual, can choose have my alternative.
- packetlost 2y ago
  It's not really possible to avoid bootstrapping on a centralized authority in general, and DNS seems like a mostly reasonable backstop for that. As others have said, you can make your own DNS network and people have.
Orthographic 2y ago
(I've updated this post as I've learned more). Thank you. ATProtocol is really cool, but I share some concerns about the centralized resolution of identities to custom servers and the conflict of interest in Bluesky's stewardship of ATProtocol development (what is good for the ATProtocol Network vs what is good for Bluesky). If I understand Bluesky correctly: When you follow users on Bluesky (even those on a hosted custom server), atprotocol allows you to follow them by a "URL" (DID:web) but by default you're following them by their DID:PLC, a kind of Decentralized Id that is resolved via an equivalent to a "name server" (see: https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc). You give that name server a DID json representing a user you want to follow or are following, it will tell you the IP of the (custom atproto) server where that user's posts and replies are. By default Bluesky apps only know about PLC nameservers that are in Bluesky's registry. And so even if I'm using custom hosting if Bluesky PLC nameserver delists my DID (or the nameserver that points to me?) most bluesky users will be unable to find me. Bluesky is theoretically interested in moving this nameserver under a nonprofit consortium structure - where no one entity could prevent a nameserver from being listed - but no one is working on it, and BlueSky for years hasn't gotten around to it. My questions are: 1. Is that right, or are there any promising nascent efforts to create a nameserver registry under a consortium structure? 2. Is it fair to ask users, potential users and developers to take it as an article of faith that BlueSky will fully support and partner with such a consortium (since it hasn't helped set one up already in the years of its development)? 3. If Bluesky has features that are not being "backported" to ATproto, does this not raise concerns about Bluesky's conflict of interest in its current stewardship of ATProtocol? One could imagine a situation where Bluesky "slow walks" contributions to ATProto out of its own private company interest in keeping its userbase on Bluesky servers.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I don’t work for bsky, but pay a lot of attention: 1. Basically, yeah. That said, I still think it may be a bit early to do this. A consortium would be useful if it was meaningfully independent of bsky, so you need to grow and gain interest first. Otherwise the “independent group” would be run by the same people, which is pretty meaningless. Plus, working on that means les time for working on other things. I would expect to see this happen once there’s another non-toy atproto application, and for representatives from it to be involved too. Before then feels premature to me, but I can appreciate others may feel differently. 2. I do. The team has continually set out a vision, and then executed on it, over and over. Including following through on things that actively reduce their control over things. Tons of folks asked a similar question previously: “they’re saying that you’ll be able to host your own PDS someday, but do you trust them to actually ship that and not just say they’re gonna a do it and put it off forever and keep control?” And then they shipped it. 3. Any application has semantics built on top of the underlying protocol: that’s what an application is, in some meaningful sense. But I do agree that without independent governance for atproto, doing things like that could stifle other users of atproto, sure. We’re back in the same realm as 1, imho. I’m following the devs of various other apps and none of them have expressed that they think bsky is hoarding the goods so far, at least.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Thanks Paul & all. I also enjoyed Brian Newbold 's post from early August taking inventory of how Bluesky is doing so far at being decentralizable, and what's remaining, https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/ There's some wildly negative often wildly in my view inaccurate posts down below slinging all kinds of things. So much of it is so wildly off base. Atproto dev has a ton of strong wins already, and there's been a massive influx of dev interest in the past few weeks. Really looking forward to seeing this ecosystem bloom. I feel like we are at an inflection point.
evbogue 2y ago
Yes, of course Bluesky is federated. The hosts hold onto your keypairs. The DID:PLC is a substring of your first hash. For those of you who are interested in solving this my first suggestion is to read the Scuttlebot docs which are still up at: https://scuttlebot.io/ https://scuttlebot.io/ Sometimes I think about a retro Scuttlebot revival. If you want to set sail on this kind of project, contact info is in my bio.
- selecsosi 2y ago
  Always liked the ssb protocol and had an account but am just not much of a poster to ever add much value. Appreciate the design and open build process. Been following for a long time, hope you are doing well
  - evbogue 2y ago
    Thanks! I'm well. Yes, Scuttlebot's offline-firstness and the friend of a friend replication strategy were ahead of their time.

colesantiago 2y ago

Unfortunately close to nobody on or has moved to Bluesky cares about it being decentralized, they just want another Twitter that just works. Most of the people on Bluesky that have moved are artists, academics, writers and creative folks that don't care about tech. If they did care about decentralization they would be all going to Mastodon right now, but there isn't any traction there in the millions.

pfraze 2y ago
I’m not sure that’s true. We have a lot of people who are invested in the protocol and the technology. I post threads about it periodically, and people are pretty engaged & excited: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y
threeseed 2y ago
Bluesky = 13m users, Mastodon = 9m users. Bluesky hasn't released what their DAU/MAUs are but Mastodon's aren't that bad. https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a https://mastodon-analytics.com https://mastodon-analytics.com
- amatecha 2y ago
  Dunno, this account[0] says Mastodon has 15.5m users, says it pulls from https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ .. no clue how reliable/accurate their data is though. [0] https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/113270983367781353 https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11327098336778135...
- colesantiago 2y ago
  Bluesky has 1.43M daily active users on average and 6M monthly actives. https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d... Mastodon has dropped to 800K monthly actives and has no data on daily actives which I would assume that number would be even lower. Not a good look for Mastodon, considering that huge drop of 400K monthly users on that active users chart and did not recover even after Elon's changes to X, the majority of X users in Brazil chose Bluesky and ignored Mastodon.

bowsamic 2y ago

I'm not really sure what the benefit of BS over Mastodon is anyway. Everyone interesting is on Mastodon

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 2y ago
Bluesky’s more accessible to the general public. I’m on both, though use Mastodon more (partially due to _far_ better third party clients available); it’s a very different crowd.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  How would you describe Bluesky's crowd vs. Mastodon? I found the latter great for finding interesting developers, musicians, artists, etc. My X is full of people having constant meltdowns or who are just always fighting others, no one really sharing anything interesting. Haven't tried bluesky bc it was invite only (I assume it isn't anymore if you say it's accessible) and I didn't really care enough to ask for one from someone.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    bsky is open to anyone, and has been for a while now, that’s correct.
jacooper 2y ago
Sure, if you don't care about sports, news, anything other than tech. Bluesky literally just started and it already covers more things than mastodon ever did while providing a better UX without stupid technical limitations like not implementing global full text search.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Are there artists and musicians on bluesky, or just programmers?

threeseed 2y ago

Not sure how it is better than Threads. At least Meta is delivering on their promise to integrate with Mastodon and move us closer to decentralised social networks.

d1sxeyes 2y ago
I mean, Meta’s ActivityPub integration is one-way on public profiles. I think even Facebook used to allow you to get RSS feeds of your friends’ updates in the early days. Threads’s lip-service towards AP is barely better than that.
pfraze 2y ago
Bluesky integrates with Mastodon better than Threads does at this point. I have bidirectional conversations with mastodon users, with notifications, using a bridge called BridgyFed. I can follow Mastodon users on Bluesky. I can’t with Threads.
- maelito 2y ago
  How seamless is it ? Any daily problems ? Can you show a link to a conversation made this way ?
  - jamesmunns 2y ago
    I bridged my bluesky account, if you're on mastodon and want to talk to me here, you're welcome to. Not sure if you need to opt-in on the mastodon side to be bridged to bluesky. @jamesmunns.com@bsky.brid.gy I think you can opt-in here? https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/jamesmunns.com/followers https://fed.brid.gy/bsky/jamesmunns.com/followers
timeon 2y ago
I have hard time believing Meta since both Facebook and Instagram are not open to public. But time will tell.

udev4096 2y ago

[flagged]

jeroenhd 2y ago

Bluesky's marketing is rather annoying on my opinion. They're not defederated in practice and they probably never will be, but that's okay. People don't want a new Mastodon, they want a new Twitter after Musk fucked that up worse than ever. Their promises of portability may ring empty but so far their lack of AI algorithm and ad feeds are what people actually come to Bluesky for If you want federation, ActivityPub is there and ready to go. You could probably hack together a bidirectional Bluesky <-> Mastodon bridge without too much effort (requiring an account on BS to post from Mastodon) and enjoy the portability of your main account while also being able to follow your friends and such on BS.

exodust 2y ago
[flagged]
- threeseed 2y ago
  I just tried signing up for X using a new account. 99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc. Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.
  - exodust 2y ago
    "99%"... sure. So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention. Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information trolls, intifada-fascists, take your pick! I remember back when Trump was president, every single post he made on Twitter had a torrent of abusive replies bubbling to the top. Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government were met with endless insult-memes. Surely you don't think Twitter was once a place where inflammatory posts were rare and everyone had good manners?
    - 2y ago

its-summertime 2y ago

> BlueSky's big claim is [they have] "no algorithm". https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice Over a year ago, a blog claiming the opposite > But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request. AFAIK People with did:web dids can make accounts and use bluesky > And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital. And one of the first investors was Jack Dorsey. They've used libraries and concepts that are only vogue amongst those with cryptography/cryptocurrency interests. This is not new, this is always been the case. - - - A person, any person, can join the relevant developer chats, or find and ask people who are working on or have brought up their own servers, about how centralized or decentralized bsky is, but that does not seem to be the case for this person's research.

pxoe 2y ago
what does have a "big claim" that they have "no algorithm" is mastodon, which says so on its joinmastodon.org page and in its instance blurb. which just so obviously could not even possibly be true.
- cuu508 2y ago
  The news feed in Mastodon is chronologic, it includes all posts from the accounts you follow (and have not muted).
  - Kye 2y ago
    Chronological sorting is an algorithm. You don't hear its dissenters as much, but it's not without issue. It's not always the best way to present things.
    - j_maffe 2y ago
      Repeating my comment here because some people are deliberately stick manning this argument: > In the context of social media, people mean highly optimized algorithms for maximum retention.

blitzar 2y ago

Still waiting for my day 1 request to be considered for membership to come through. Don't think I made the cut.

paulgb 2y ago
You can just sign up now, you don’t need an invite.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Its ok, they have my details. I am sure they will let me know when it is time.
  - pfraze 2y ago
    I personally and formally invite you to join. Im sure your original invite got lost in the mail. Fwiw the invites were really just to manage scale. We weren’t ready yet and demand was high. We weren’t trying to exclude people
    - dredds 2y ago
      A reservation queue would have worked just as well. (first in first served) The invite system sets up existing hierarchy of insiders and outsiders from the get-go, favoring the already popular, and creating a wall for new (single) users perhaps not in the hot geolocations where invites get handed out in bulk. It actually excludes people who are already struggling to socialize, and rewards those who have all the 'right connections'.
      - pfraze 2y ago
        We did both. I don’t know why the invite didn’t reach their email

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

maxlin 2y ago

[flagged]

rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, Twitter itself borrowed most of its concepts from either the user base (@ mentions, replies, retweets, quote tweets were all informal behaviours before they were features) or other social media platforms, particularly Tumblr. It is very much a field where doing it well beats being the first. Of course, if you’re earlier you have network effects, but Carface seems doggedly determined to compensate by driving the existing network away.
- maxlin 2y ago
  I don't disagree but that's not my point. The point is, there's little reason to go to the clones, you just lose the network effects, as X is still clearly "the" place to post stuff, and where your identity is the strongest. Which is important given in actuality it's not such a walled garden with authoritarian rule throwing people out like Twitter was. Only when everyone can have their say, you end up with something that ACTUALLY represents the "town square". Blue Sky might also be the town square, but more akin to one of a closed soviet military town.

pxoe 2y ago

Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated. It doesn't solve some of the problems that come with centralization, it just creates more entities that will have the same problems (being at will of a server). And funnily, it doesn't even solve data portability entirely (you can't actually move your posts). Mastodon's "decentralization" is even worse than a "theoretical promise" of one, cause it's a just marketing promise when it literally just does not work that way in some aspects. You're still "centralized" to whatever server you signed up on, still with caveats that an actual centralized service would have. It's better, but it's truly not all it's made out to be. Definitely not to the point where such sneer and kind of just, speculatively making shit up, wouldn't look just ironic.

rtpg 2y ago
"Being at will of a server" is always a problem, but with federation you can choose which server you are at the will of. You still need trust, but that trust can be chosen by you based off of your needs (and that trust can be placed in yourself). You're on a different part of the trust gradient. Meanwhile there's a certain quality of service that can be obtained with "mere" federation that is much tougher for many decentralized strategies. The actual topology matters, but federation is a pretty decent model IMO! There's a reason that e-mail has been so useful as a system for so long!
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  And the federation also made the spam email problem a lot worse ;-) Anyhow, federation should be seen as a part of specific strategy for decentralization; federation itself is not decentralization and cannot achieve it without more bits---like topological consideration. Many federated protocols tend to push those bits into the horizon and fail at scale when that horizon eventually approaches, while ATProto is at least explicitly constructed with eventual decentralization in the mind and seems to be fine for now. Mastodon will need to prove much more than ATProto in order to show that it's capable for eventual decentralization in contrast.
  - davexunit 2y ago

gr__or 2y ago

I think there is an interesting piece to be written about how prone bsky is to being captured by a single entity. It would look at how the reality of PDS today is 99.9999% (not the actual number, but ballpark) bsky hosted, also true for the relay. Then it would outline EEE scenarios, their likelihoods and whether bksy is sufficiently decentralized to fend them off. This post is not that and misses the mark for me.

benreesman 2y ago

It’s hard to imagine any upper bound on broken or useless or corrupt that would invalidate one more news feed. The gates are open on Google Search shaping your information, on Meta shaping your fashion, on Amazon shaping your commercial instinct. And on YC boosting tired legacies around AirBnB rather than contemporary realities like Garry “Die Motherfucker” Tan pimping Pear “ChatGPT that license” shit on X. I’ve had a beer with Zuckerberg and one with Dorsey, I say it can’t get any worse.

moffkalast 2y ago

I'm not sure how we can get the point that a centralized seamless UX experience is core to any platform though the thick skulls of people designing decentralized federated services. Lemmy's active user number drops every month and as does Mastodon's by a lesser degree, both failing to get proper traction because they segment and wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening, making sure that people waste time frequenting empty communities instead of merging it all together. Regardless of how the backend is handled, centralized or not, people need the same thing on the frontend. These valiant attempts at remaking popular sites for the people by the people are not only fighting every corporation that wants them gone as a concept but also their own dumb decisions, which will probably prove too much of a hurdle in the long run.

bbor 2y ago
I wanted to like lemmy so bad. I lucked into a lifetime ban from Reddit after using it daily for 12 years, so you’d think it would be easy! But there’s just not enough people to make it interesting, not even close. I subbed to every damn instance I could find, and still no luck. https://slrpnk.net https://slrpnk.net is an exception in that it’s a cute place for activism and related news, but that’s obviously not the only thing I want to use the internet for, especially when I’m looking to relax. So far, with an n of 5 days: BlueSky is what I was waiting for. Especially for scientific content - memes or otherwise!
timeon 2y ago
> wall off tiny gardens where nothing is happening This is actually reason why I like Mastodon. There is barely anything happening. I get content from few niches - but I do not need it to be generating something every minute. I have no time for that. But for people who prefer old Twitter experience, BlueSky is pretty good.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  I would go out on a limb and postulate that most people prefer lots of meaningless content. At least if the popularity of Tiktok is anything to go buy.

scirob 2y ago

People on mastodon are so toxic. I tried to contribute code and content was threatened with lawsuits by people who don't understand that their protocol is explicitly designed for open data

cuu508 2y ago
Can you share a link to where this happened?
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34400143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34400143

openrisk 2y ago

It is interesting that nobody comments on the "ownership" data point of the post. > And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? Yet that is the only thing that matters. The technical pieces for a vast range of alternative designs for online interactions are already available. Decentralized, federated, distributed, peer-to-peer. Who cares? What matters is the outcome. What is entirely missing in these silly "protocol wars" is any concrete and realistic vision of what that "good next generation Web" looks like, not technically, but economically, socially and politically. Who gets empowered and who gets exploited. Who gets (and how strong) a voice and who gets manipulated by that voice. The prior norms, social contracts and institutions we used to have in the pre-digital era have been completely corrupted yet there is no visible replacement beyond some vague ideals. The shape of the "next gen web" very much depends on who funds it, why (what incentives and expectations do they have) and how (what incentives and expectations do they create to the vast ecosystems of developers, entrepreneurs, moderators, users, etc).

alexch 2y ago
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dangsux 2y ago

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badrequest 2y ago

This is a ludicrous paranoid screed that, thanks to the nature of Mastodon, will not be on the live internet in a decade's time.

ck2 2y ago

People are going to nit-pic and while some of the concerns have some weight to them, so far they are trivial IMHO The fact is we need an alternative to X because the current owner has done and will continue to do terrible things not just to the service but apparently on a personal and political level that is beyond distasteful to a HUGE chunk of the users (if not even greater than 50%) And Threads isn't going to cut it for similar reasons. So in an imperfect world Bluesky is what we get and it's a legit alternative that's better. The fact a Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge exists says A LOT. Good luck ever getting something like that with X without paying a literal fortune for it.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
Bluesky, being by Twitter founders, isn't that much better in this sense than Threads/Facebook/Meta. And the biggest issue with Xitter still isn't Elon Musk (have you forgotten the "Trump years" already ?), but because the way how that media works is turning discussions into flamewars, and its users into morons (including Musk, who reportedly was hooked on it long before he bought it). It's especially concerning when journalists (who really should know better) and politicians use it. That blame lies very much on Twitter's founders.

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avinassh 2y ago

related: any high level architecture details on how BlueSky uses SQLite per user?

deleted 2y ago
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Natanael_L 2y ago
It's used in a not particularly advanced way - bluesky uses repositories per each user for all their public social activity (posts, likes, etc) and it creates a Merkle tree as an index for them and signs that index (this enables stuff like authenticated content addressing and efficient verification). SQLite simply stores those posts and that signed Merkle tree. The PDS account host server also has another SQLite DB with a list of its accounts. They have fancier stuff in their appview server and relay server

jrm4 2y ago

Bluesky's claims to why they're better than anything always sound like crazy pill stuff to me. Other services both centralize identity AND algorithms/operations. This seems to centralize identity WITHOUT the second thing, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds. It's just, we've already mostly "solved" the centralized identity problem with EMAIL. As often, the key is "fail elegantly," not be bulletproof. Email, in it's federated state, allows for individuals to more or less choose what kind of centralization they want -- and more importantly, to kill and restart accounts if needed. Thus, Mastodon is the best parallel. What am I missing? What is the advantage of bluesky here?

relaxing 2y ago
> What is the advantage of bluesky here? Fewer Nazis.
- jrm4 2y ago
  Yeah, this is another issue entirely, but also very often wrong and misses the point. Roughly, e.g. -- Twitter (nope not calling it X) is still overwhelmingly the most useful and productive place for Black+US Politics discussion. Despite, or even perhaps because of, the presence of bad guys. The thing I hate the most about Mastodon (despite being the right model) is people trying to make it nice, but end up making it STERILE. The left leaning folks, who politically I generally strongly agree with, really do overdo it in terms of "shutting down disagreeable speech." (Bluesky is similar to Mastodon here)
  - relaxing 2y ago
    What’s some of this disagreeable speech you’ve been shut down on.
    - swed420 2y ago
      Yeah, it would have been more accurate for GP to say "liberal" instead of "left" since mastodon (and large parts of lemmy) have been overrun with liberals who label any leftist a "tankie"

apitman 2y ago

To date decentralization is inversely correlated to good UX. * nostr is very decentralized (keys) and has terrible UX (manual management of keys). * Mastodon is medium decentralized (dependence on DNS; can't migrate accounts) and has bad UX (confusion about which instance to use; "Take Me Home" to interact with anything). * Bluesky (atproto) is moderately decentralized (did:plc) and has great UX. The main advantage that atproto has over the other two is that if someone solves the did:plc problem, it can become the first very decentralized/great UX social media platform over night.

StellarStoic 2y ago
Nostr's poor UX is a feature, not a bug. It serves as a reminder that life isn’t perfect. Basic knowledge of manual key management should be essential for every internet user. Think about password managers. What I love about Nostr is that individuals can actively participate in making it better. It’s fully open, allowing anyone to build whatever they wish on top of it. I agree it’s not perfect now, but it will improve over time and the progress already made can speak for itself that Nostr is here to stay and it's getting better and better each day. The more developers the Nostr ecosystem has, the faster it will evolve. Personally, I enjoy using it. Cross-posting has been resolved, so I can’t even remember the last time I opened Twitter. Mastodon never really attract me much. Bluesky is yet another Twitter and it's not decentralized. They can read your DMs btw. One of best features of Nostr is when you build something, you get users instantly and whenever I post on nostr I cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky as well. Reactions are also interchangeable :)