5 ms·
Apparently Bluesky has one centralized service, the "relay"
- aspenmayer 2y agoPreviously, related: Wait, how did a decentralized service like Bluesky go down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43789178 - April 2025 (2 comments)
- serial_dev 2y agoIf you understand that Bluesky today is just Twitter for a different audience, then you realize nobody there cares about decentralization and all that mumbo jumbo. Which is fine, I don’t care either, but this whole spiel that they are decentralized feels dishonest.
- cranberryturkey 2y agoUse nostr. checkout primal.net
- robobro 2y agoor activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds
- irusensei 2y agoNostr relays are in essence extremely dumb websocket servers. The most popular relay software is nostr-rs-relay a single binary written in rust that automatically spins up an SQLite database. Bitcoin discussion yes, but mostly because bitcoiners are avid self hosters. Cryptocurrency not much. The “crypto” people created their own thing if I’m not mistaken. Nostr was spun out as a truly censorship resistant protocol so it’s a given people who distrusts both centralized services and island style moderation are there don’t you think? dergigi once described Nostr with an analogy to a gay bar. The place is nice, the furniture is fancy, the drinks pleasant and the people who frequent it are mostly nice but if you are not gay you won’t stick for so long. Nothing keeps you from creating a moderated relay or curate your feeds though. One of the coolest things about Nostr IMO is how extendable the protocol is and how easy you can develop crazy stuff for it. Ah and for some reason there are some Japanese users.
- cranberryturkey 2y agoNostr is super flexible too since its a protocol. I see reddit-style and hacker news style sites, documentation sites, blog sites...and yes twitter/x style sites as well. Hell there's even a streaming platform on nostr too. The common criticism is that its all bitcoiners, that's mainly because it uses Lightning Network for zaps and that's how people get paid in nostr. So naturally its a lot of bitcoiners in the nostr communities.
- aspenmayer 2y agoThat sounds really interesting. I haven’t really kept up with nostr. Would you mind linking some examples of the types of sites you mentioned?
- cranberryturkey 2y agohttps://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
- aspenmayer 2y agoThank you! What’s your favorite nostr thing you’ve seen?
- cranberryturkey 2y agoI haven't looked at activitypub yet, didn't know it was a w3c rec.
- yellowapple 2y agoIt's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one. In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
- boramalper 2y agoGenuine question: if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay, why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Most of that money must be earmarked for administrative and human expenses then, right? [0] https://freeourfeeds.com/ https://freeourfeeds.com/ [1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-billionaires https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-bi... [2] https://freeourfeeds.com/ https://freeourfeeds.com/ § FAQ § What will the money be used for?
- Karliss 2y agoScale, its always question of scale. Whatever youncan easily and cheaply host yourself will likely be only good enough for you and your friends or family. Anything more will require more hardware and dedicated people for maintaining that hardware and software.
- yellowapple 2y ago> if it's so easy and cheap to host a relay That wasn't asserted anywhere. Quite the opposite: as I explained above, the expense is why few people have done it (and even fewer have done it in production). It's the PDSes which are (relatively) cheap and easy to self-host. > why then "Free Our Feeds" initiative [0] looking to raise $4,000,000 [1] to establish a second relay [2]? Per the section you cite, they're doing a lot more with that money than running a second relay: they're spinning up an entirely separate organization independent of Bluesky to develop ATproto and applications using it. That includes, but is nowhere implied or explied to be limited to, the "second relay" they mention. In any case, even the self-hosted relay described in that above-linked blog post (let alone some RPi under someone's bed) is in all likelihood a long ways off from one that's even remotely production-ready. There's no mention of redundancy, no mention of future-proofing, etc. It's reasonable to assume that the "second relay" would be multiple such relays, likely on machines with even beefier specs - in other words, at least as capable as the existing Bluesky-managed relay. I'd also be unsurprised if it expanded to a "third relay" and "fourth relay" and so on. Further, there's more to running a relay than just the hardware; you need someone to maintain it. $4 million pays for 40 employee-years (assuming every employee is full-time with an annual salary of $100k). That could be one sysadmin for 40 years, or an 8 person team for 5 years, or a 40 person team for 1 year, or what have you. Free our feeds claims they'll need $30 million over 3 years, i.e. $10 million per year; if half that goes to salaries, we end up with a napkin-math-guesstimated team size of 50 - which is about the size I'd expect for an organization that wants to independently maintain a bunch of technical infrastructure, develop applications, prod whomever needs prodded to get ATproto formally standardized, etc.
- rwmj 2y agoHaven't we learned by now that approximately no one cares? Centralised services are vastly more popular than federated ones, the main reason being that they reduce the paradox / paralysis of choice when you're signing up for them. (Solve that problem properly and you may be on to something.)
- ajuc 2y agoThe main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with. I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with. First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar. I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
- ajb 2y agoThe first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking time away from product, it's not just the salary but the opportunity cost, because any investment in product is supposed to return a multiple.
- AlecSchueler 2y agoWhat conclusions could you draw from this observation?
- rglullis 2y agoAnd you know what would be even cheaper (in the medium/long term) than the IT in-house or outsourcing to commercial SaaS? If the company took 10-20% of their budget to sponsor the development of FOSS alternatives.
- goranmoomin 2y agoi don’t actively contribute to Bluesky nor Fedi (i do consume content from both), but it’s pretty frustrating to see BlueSky being argued into a centralized service for the recent downtime. - The downtime was not relay level, but it was a PDS level. So the point is moot already. - Because it was decentralized at the PDS level, the outage did not affect anyone with personal PDSes, which contains the data that you care about. - Even if it was the relay level, relays aren’t centralized, anyone can spin up another relay (because everything on the relay is derived from PDS data). It’s just that it’s going to be pretty expensive and consume much resources. Which is a fair point, and might be argued that the network currently has a single big point of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s centralized. And then people now start arguing that the fact that BlueSky-hosted PDSes went down at the same time is now another proof that BlueSky is centralized? That’s like arguing that Gmail can go down and all @gmail.com mail addresses won’t work, so email is centralized. Or AWS can have an outage and all AWS-powered websites will break down, so the web is centralized. One can say that there’s a single big point of failure (which the BlueSky LLC is, just like AWS, Gmail, or the mastodon.social instance in the case of Fedi), but that doesn’t make the whole service centralized.
- danpalmer 2y agoYeah lots of the commenting online seems in somewhat bad faith about this. I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community. Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things. Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour. Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway. Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.
- pbiggar 2y agoI used to not care about centralized or decentralized services, I just wanted to best product. Now I see how each of the major social media networks has been involved in censorship of Israel's genocide in Palestine (including btw HN), it makes me realize how important decentralization is. I think a lot of Americans (and other countries who have essentially handed over their media to US social media companies) are going to learn same lessons soon, as Trump starts to leverage the existing censorship tools more broadly.
- baxuz 2y agoDecentralization doesn't really help, it only creates more bubbles. Reddit is extremely centralized, and you can find hundreds of subreddits that do cover Israel's ethnic cleansing. However, most popular subreddits are heavily censored, while the smaller communities become an echo chamber, and often get radicalized. Decentralized bubbles are still bubbles—even worse, since the barrier to entry is higher.
- pbiggar 2y agoLinkedIn's approach has been to segregate pro-Palestinian content to a bubble where it's not shown to people outside it. Now, that is believed to be because they are deliberately trying to limit pro-Palestinian liberation content due to the extremely pro-apartheid and pro-occupation beliefs of their CPO Tomer Cohen, but it's none the less pretty effective.
- madeofpalk 2y agoGiving users control over the bubble, rather than one company, is the important part.
- poincaredisk 2y agoIs it? How does it help with radicalization? If anything it makes it worse, since people on the extreme political spectrum will always try harder than the regulars, while companies care only about that sweet, sweet money that comes from being bland and attracting the masses. Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about privacy and want a decentralized works, but it comes with its own cans of worms.
- rambambram 2y agoThe genie is already out of the bottle for thirty years, and it's called the open web. Luckily I don't need half the world's population to agree upon and use something that already exists out there. Keep posting on your website and keep linking. It's called the 'web' for a reason.
- jstummbillig 2y ago> It's called the 'web' for a reason. Yes, historic ones. It's not a prediction about the future shape of the internet.
- rambambram 2y agoYou know why it's called the web? Because all the websites and webpages linking to each other form the shape of a web. I don't know what shape the internet is going to be, but the web is shaped like a web. Also tomorrow.
- hkt 2y agoI love the web, but it is also clear that much of the internet is now a hub and spoke model. Client/server, in other words. The difficulty was always matching clients with different servers, and the centralised services never had to solve it.
- rambambram 2y agoI'm on HN for years now and what I slowly came to realize is that people here (maybe more than somewhere else, maybe not) like to spend time and energy explaining how stuff is, like it's still some sort of school test that gives one points for all the correct answers. Thereby easily forgetting what has been and still is, what works, what one can do about stuff in a positive way, what choices people have (instead of constantly pretending there is no choice, or someone else already chose for us), etc. Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness. P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions. P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.
- brap 2y agoEverything decentralized will become effectively centralized once it’s popular enough. Most people don’t care.
- myaccountonhn 2y agoI think people are starting to care more and more. People are using Mastodon, many are switching to Bluesky believing it is decentralized. If you teach people why they should care, I believe many actually do care. Many users just don't know enough to make a choice.
- brap 2y agoWhich people? The kind who browse HN? Bluesky is only getting some attention now from people outside of tech because Musk is disliked and it’s basically the only alternative. I assure you most of them don’t know or care what “decentralized” means.
- myaccountonhn 2y agoI know plenty who know and care that are not in the HN crowd.
- arnaudsm 2y agoMost users don't care about that. Decentralized governance is more important that decentralized hosting. Wikipedia being the best example.
- vfclists 2y agoDidn't the Mastodon guys make their high-performance system a pay only system instead of open source?
- zft 2y agoRelay is not centralized service, plc.directory is.