11 ms·

Are we decentralized yet?

• d4mi3n 1y ago
  Neat! I'm not surprised at the findings here. BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization like we've seen in the AT-Proto ecosystem. I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems.
  • isodev 1y ago
    ATProto also has the downside of being supported by a corporation and investors with various backgrounds that will eventually want to earn something out of it all and there is no telling how this will happen.
    • gary_0 1y ago
      There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. I do think the geeks currently running Bluesky are sincere in keeping it decentralized, but the money people will someday probably force them out and squeeze the user base for a quick buck. A hardcore nerd minority will splinter off, though, and keep the decentralized version running, so whatever. History repeats. Frog swims, scorpion stings.
      • robertlagrant 1y ago
        Is it a quick buck? How long has bluesky been funded for with no return?
        • gary_0 1y ago
          I meant "quick buck" like flooding the place with ads, tracking, dark patterns, closing the API/protocol, or doing some sort of crypto scam, with no regard for the platform's long-term health. It's been funded for a few years? That's not really that long for such a small team. But I have no idea how their investors think it might make "Facebook money", and isn't that always the goal?
        • Dylan16807 1y ago
          Quick meaning it's short term from when it starts. The time before it starts doesn't factor in.
          • robertlagrant 1y ago
            A quick buck would be the time from when you put your money in to when you get back your money and a profit.
            • Dylan16807 1y ago
              If you have a sudden massive change in plans like this, it resets the timer. You were doing long term, but now you want a quick buck and you don't care much if the company survives. If I set up a get rich quick scheme based on overhyping and selling land, it doesn't matter whether I buy the land today or it's land I had for decades for a completely different reason. Either way I'm going for a quick buck now.
              • robertlagrant 1y ago
                But they didn't have this for completely different reasons. They invested money years ago, that they could've bought government bonds with and just earned interest, and instead it went into BlueSky. At some point they'd like a return that would substantially beat the government bond they could've invested in with zero risk.
                • Dylan16807 1y ago
      • YetAnotherNick 1y ago
        > There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo Like what?
        • gary_0 1y ago
          Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother). Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.
          • YetAnotherNick 1y ago
            I think you are wildly overestimating the user's willingness to pay online, and underestimating the costs to run a large scale site. Even if you remove developer's salaries and server costs, the fines could be worth 10s of millions of dollar per country just for delay in removal of hate speech[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
          • miki123211 1y ago
            They could also follow the Gmail playbook. For consumers, plenty of ads and plenty of tracking. For businesses, heavily-restricted user-to-server APIs and features gated behind subscriptions, think custom domains with Bsky hosting, multi-user post approvals, integrating DMs with customer support systems etc. You can do all of that while still being fair to and interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem. As long as you don't want the convenience, features and UI of Gmail, you can still communicate with Gmail users from any other provider, and the same could be true about Bsky.
      • beeflet 1y ago
        >There are lots of ways they could make a sustainable income without disrupting Bluesky's current status quo and be comfortably rich for the rest of their lives... but that's completely out of character for them and will never happen. Sounds like reddit 15 years ago
    • Matl 1y ago
      ATProto also currently effectively relies on https://web.plc.directory https://web.plc.directory which is a centralized service, making the protocol effectively centralized.
      • danabramov 1y ago
        This is true but it's worth noting that (1) the entire point of this node is to be globally agreed on since it's the root of the identity mechanism, (2) it is auditable (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#audit-logs https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...) and operations themselves are self-certifying (https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-ov-file#privacy-and-security-concerns https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc?tab=readme-...). There are some potential issues (like PLC could choose to deny some operations), and the plan is to upstream PLC into an independent entity so that it isn't tied to Bluesky the company.
    • verdverm 1y ago
      How does Meta's adoption of ActivityPub play into the corporation and investors supporting / dominating a protocol in the long run?
    • qwm 1y ago
      Anything that is funded by venture capital WILL become worse. You can complain all you want about things that don't have infinite funding having issues, but they'll probably just stay at the same level or get slightly better over time. VC-backend companies only get worse after their early peak.
  • danabramov 1y ago
    >I suspect that the cost of running AT proto servers/relays is prohibitive for smaller players compared to a Mastadon server selectively syndicating with a few peers, but I say this with only a vague understanding of the internals of both of these ecosystems. This isn't quite right. ATProto has a completely different "shape" so it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparison. Roughly speaking, you can think of Mastodon as a bunch of little independently hosted copies of Twitter that "email" (loosely speaking) each other to propagate information that isn't on your server. So it's cheap to run a server for a bunch of friends but it's cut off from what's happening in the world. Your identity is tied to your server (that's your webapp), and when you want to follow someone on another server, your server essentially asks that other server to send stuff to yours. This means that by default your view of the network is extremely fragmented — replies, threads, like counts are all desynchronized and partial[1] depending on which server you're looking from and which information is being forwarded to it. ATProto, on the other hand, is designed with a goal of actually being competitive with centralized services. This means that it's partitioned differently – it's not "many Twitters talking to each other" which is Mastodon's model. Instead, in ATProto, there is a separation of concerns: you have swappable hosting (your hosting is the source of truth for your data like posts, likes, follows, etc) and you have applications (which aggregate data from the former). This might remind you of traditional web: it's like every social media user posts JSON to "their own website" (i.e. hosting) while apps aggregate all that data, similar to how Google Reader might aggregate RSS. As a result, in ATProto, the default behavior is that everyone operates with a shared view of the world — you always see all replies, all comments, all likes are counted, etc. It's not partial by default. With this difference in mind, "decentralizing" ATProto is sort of multidimensional. In Mastodon, the only primitive is an "instance" — i.e. an entire Twitter-like webapp you can host for your users. But in ATProto, there are multiple decentralized primitives: - PDS (personal data hosting) is application-agnostic data store. Bluesky's implementation is open source (it uses sqlite database per user). There are also alternative implementations for the same protocol. Bluesky the company does operate the largest ones. However, running a PDS for yourself is extremely cheap (like maybe $1/mo?). It's basically just a structured KV JSON storage organized as a Merkle tree. A bit like Git hosting. - AppViews are actual "application backends". Bluesky operates the bsky.app appview, i.e. what people know as the Bluesky app. Importantly, in ATProto, there is no reason for everyone to run their own AppView. You can run one (and it costs about $300/mo to run a Bluesky AppView ingesting all data currently on the network in real time if you want to do that). Of course, if you were happy with tradeoffs chosen by Mastodon (partial view of the network, you only see what your servers' users follow), you could run that for a lot cheaper — so that's why I'm saying it's not apples-to-apples. ATProto makes it easy to have an actually cohesive experience on the network but the costs are usually being compared with fragmented experience of Mastodon. ATProto can scale down to Mastodon-like UX (with Mastodon-like costs) but it's just not very appealing when you can have the real thing. - Relays are things "in between" PDS's and AppViews. Essentially a Relay is just an optimization to avoid many-to-many connections between AppViews and PDS's. A Relay just rebroadcasts updates from all PDS's as a single stream (that AppViews can subscribe to). Running a Relay used to be expensive but it got a lot cheaper since "Sync 1.1" (when a change in protocol allowed Relays to be non-archiving). Now it costs about $30/mo to run a Relay. So all in all, running PDSs and Relays is cheap. Running full AppViews is more expensive but there's simply no equivalent to that in the Mastodon world because Mastodon is always fragmented[1]. And running a partial AppView (comparable to Mastodon behavior) should be much, much cheaper — but also not very appealing so I don't know anyone who's actually doing that. (It would also require adding a bit of code to filter out the stuff you don't care about.) [1] Mastodon is adding a workaround for this with on-demand fetching, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078133 for my questions about that; in any case, this is limited by what you can do on-demand in a pull-based decentralized system.
  • kyle-rb 1y ago
    Running a PDS server for yourself and a few friends is not very expensive afaik, but there's also not much benefit to doing so, because the point of the PDS is to have a clean separation between your own data and the rest of the network. The expensive things in ATProto are the Relay (crawls/listens to PDSs to produce the firehose) and the AppView (keeps a DB of all posts/likes/etc to serve users' requests). Expensive at scale anyway; if you want your own small network for hosting non-Bluesky posts (like WhiteWind's longer character limit), the event volume will be manageable. For a lot of stuff though ATProto is built in a way that you shouldn't have to host your own; you can implement your own algorithmic feed that reads from the Bluesky Relay's firehose, or your own frontend that still gets data from the Bluesky AppView.
    • danabramov 1y ago
      Running a relay is not expensive anymore (it used to be), with recent changes it's about $30/mo. Running an AppView that ingests all ongoing Bluesky traffic (and puts it into database) is more expensive ($300/mo currently) but if you were happy with a partial view of the network, you could get it down by a lot.
      • mxuribe 1y ago
        I'm admittedly not versed in the AT protocol, but $30/month is high for me. Something like $10/month is quite fair, and i would expect should be more than enough for a VPS to host my and 2 other members of my family for any social network service...This $10/month is overkill for other servers on the ActivityPub via say gotosocial, pleroma, etc. Not that ActivityPub is perfect or anything like that, i just mean that $30/month is not yet what i would call a sweet spot for self-hosting something...but of course, that is absolutely leagues better than any cost that the bluesky team or other bigger players would naturally have to pay for ongoing infra., etc. Then again, i will not deny that there's also the possibility that i am simply cheap! :-)
        • edavis 1y ago
          An important note here is the $30/mo is for the relay which is _not_ something the average user will ever need to run Instead, you're looking for hosting a PDS which you absolutely can do for $10/mo (or less) I run a PDS on a OVH Cloud VPS for $5/mo for myself, some alts, and some bots
  • dom96 1y ago
    > BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.
    • N_Lens 1y ago
      Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.
      • verdverm 1y ago
        https://roost.tools https://roost.tools is working on open-source options for both social (fedi or not) and beyond social. Generally the idea is that we can fight the bad things better if we are working together instead of independently ATProto's Stacked Moderation is an interesting approach to combine platform, community, and user level choices https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
      • shadowgovt 1y ago
        I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.
        • neltnerb 1y ago
          Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers). I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess. Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.
  • epcoa 1y ago
    > Despite the smaller total numbers in Mastadon, it's great to see that the ecosystem seems to be successfully avoiding centralization But since essentially no one is using it doesn’t suggest much avoidance of centralization. These factors are not independent. It’s pretty easy to avoid anything when your total user count is a rounding error compared to the alternatives.
    • yborg 1y ago
      Bluesky user count is the same order of magnitude as Mastodon and is centralized. I think your argument is actually that if you are on a minority platform your wants and needs for how that platform operates are irrelevant. I suppose that's true if you aren't on the platform, but I don't think it's true if you are.
  • grishka 1y ago
    This is due to different design goals. Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. The fediverse, on the other hand, entirely relies on people following each other. Each server only receives and stores data that is relevant to its users. ActivityPub works like an automated email list management system. You follow someone, they start sending you their updates and forwarding any updates from others that they consider relevant, like replies to their posts.
    • Merovius 1y ago
      > Bluesky's architecture was pretty much dictated by the premise that anyone needs to be able to see any post on the entire system, regardless of whether they have any connections with the author. That algorithmic entertainment-style feeds need to exist. You do need that firehose and other expensive infrastructure for that, there's no going around it. Exactly this (that people want it at least - I don't think that means it needs to exist). And I think there would be a lot less frustration in the discourse of ActivityPub vs. ATproto, if we could collectively agree that you can't get this in a decentralized system. In a dense network, the number of edges scales with the square of the number of nodes. It's just not feasible to have a network that is both dense and has a large number of nodes. I think "I prioritize virality, recommendation engines and network density, thus accept giving control over the network to a centralized and profit-oriented entity" is an entirely reasonable tradeoff to make. I just don't understand why BlueSky users don't seem to accept that it's the tradeoff they are making.
      • galactus 1y ago
        absolutely. it’s even in the design paper, when they discuss the AppView the authors say it’s “less decentralized than alternatives” and yet you can’t say that without bsky fans getting mad.
    • qwm 1y ago
      I think the Twitter format sucks in both cases, but having central, algorithmically-curated feeds are just bad for people psychologically. They just created another Twitter clone with the same problems. The only difference is fewer "nazis".
• jcims 1y ago
  How would one measure old school federated contexts like IRC and NNTP in this way? I wonder would they would fare.
  • agilob 1y ago
    Remember how freenode changed owner and pretty much everyone moved away from it in less than 1 week? It was easy and possible.
    • Retr0id 1y ago
      Perhaps "frictionless migration" is the real metric to optimize for, rather than decentralization at any given point in time.
      • jauntywundrkind 1y ago
        I tend to agree. Having tried the Fediverse twice & each time had my server shut down, had a pretty jank sad partial migration forward path (my old replies kind of being cast into limbo), it just doesn't feel like the fediverse actually has "credible exit" at this point. Decentralized but still semi trapped. Where-as with Bluesky/ at protocol, most folks are on Bluesky servers, yes. But there's a very strong credible exit case where you can leave the Bluesky servers & just do your own thing. And follow whomever you want to follow. Bluesky / at proto creates a trust mechanism beyond DNS, creates an identity that can be moved around between hosts or replicated outwards in a verifiable way. I dig ActivityPub, and have been a long time http enjoyer, but it's not ideal imo for social media to need to be so coupled to such strongly DNS based client-server systems.
    • gary_0 1y ago
      It was a pretty huge disruption, though, even though the damage wasn't fatal.
  • Bender 1y ago
    For smaller semi-private circles IRC especially with web front-ends that provide scroll-back are still great but in my experience when they get too big there is just too much politics and too many cultural differences and things start to fall apart much like agilob's example. IRC is still great for groups of like minded people that do not need to bring in the entire world into their tent. In the early internet more people were like or similar minded and so it worked well for the most part. Some would even argue it still works great for the general public but I am not so sure. Keeping web interfaces semi-private with simple-auth and disabling referrers reduces the risk of botters, agent provocateurs and other forms of riff raff trying to sow division among people, or third party AI bots snooping or arguing. NNTP is also great but most people can not afford individually to mirror entire binary groups and most ISP's no longer perform this so most people just use commercial news feeds if they want binaries or one of the free NNTP / Usenet providers if they are just using text. People can certainly peer with some of the free providers [1] and probably should to reduce the risk of people being censored. Much like IRC people can create their own little private or semi-private linked NNTP servers to replicate a distributed thread based forum of sorts. [1] - https://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=peering https://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=peering
• INTPenis 1y ago
  We're more decentralized in fedi but we're also not really consistent either. Which I think is the number one gripe for users who manage to get into the fedi. I don't mind, I still think it's a huge leap forward, but it's important to set realistic expectations.
  • torben-friis 1y ago
    What do you mean by consistent? (Never used the fediverse, so zero context here).
    • skybrian 1y ago
      Not who you're replying to, but one issue is that different users will sometimes see a different subset of replies to a post, depending on what the server they're using has copied from other servers.
      • alethic 1y ago
        This isn't correct. Mastodon merged fetch-all-replies in March. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615 The only difference in visible replies is in the moderation choices of the server the post is viewed from.
        • skybrian 1y ago
          Good to know. Thanks for the update!
        • danabramov 1y ago
          How does it work? In ATProto, there is no need to do this on-demand because the data is already there in the AppView. When you want to serve a page of replies, you read them from the database and serve them. There is no distributed fetching involved, no need to hit someone else's servers, no need to coalesce them or worry about limiting fetches, etc. This is why it works fine for threads without thousands of replies and hundreds of nesting levels. It can also be paginated on the server. If you don't have this information on your server, how can you gracefully fetch thousands of replies from different servers and present a cohesive picture during a single request? I'm sure this PR does an attempt at that but I'm not sure this is a direct comparison because Mastodon can't avoid doing this on-demand. If we're comparing, it would be good to list the tradeoffs of Mastodon's implementation (and how it scales to deep threads) more explicitly.
• casey2 1y ago
  How do these metrics compare with usenet circa ~1989
• Animats 1y ago
  Keep the needle pointing north. Towards the center of that dial. Too decentralized, and you can't find anything. Nobody uses it. Too centralized, and censorship takes over. Nobody can speak freely.
  • maxbond 1y ago
    I don't disagree but I do wonder if a.) discoverability is really so intractable in a decentralized environment if you're willing to throw a lot of resources towards indexing and b.) if that middle ground isn't like balancing a pendulum upside down - a very fragile equilibrium. A bunch of decentralized units might join together, or a large centralized unit might fail, pushing the pendulum to either side. You can think of the golden age of blogs and search as an example of both. Search engines formed a centralized hub with blogs, forums, etc. forming the spokes. For a while that worked well before it was degraded by spam and consolidation of disparate forums etc. into a handful of major platforms (fueled partly be acquisitions).
    • Animats 1y ago
      That's a good point. Thiel's "Zero to One" makes it. In economics, a market needs several reasonably strong businesses to get price competition. An EU study indicated that the minimum number is about 4. Below 4, price competition seems to disappear and you have oligopoly, or, at 1, monopoly. In areas where there's no inherent effect like distance to stop centralization, markets tend towards oligopoly. Look at the number of browsers, the number of big banks, the number of cellular phone companies, and so forth. They're all between 2 and 4. The stable state seems to be around 3 big players. This probably applies to social networks. There's only so much attention available.
    • hklgny 1y ago
      The fediverse folks are violently against any efforts for discoverability. They like the high bar for discovering and joining. Any attempt gets brigaded and shut down quickly
      • M2Ys4U 1y ago
• jarbus 1y ago
  Mastodon has been great so far
• danielpoer1098 1y ago
  [dead]
• treyd 1y ago
  I'd like to see Nostr added to this, since userbase concentration is always the thing they levy against the fedi model. It'd be a little weird to adapt because user identities don't live on single relays.
  • irusensei 1y ago
    It would be weirdly represented since most clients push to multiple relays while the account so to speak is a public key pair on the user's device.
• colesantiago 1y ago
  The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.
  • 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
    SMTP, HTTP, DNS, routing protocols work pretty well despite decentralization/federation. Their "problem" is their greatest strength: they're stupidly simple. E-mail is really ingenious. It doesn't even define how to send and receive messages in the same standard. One standard is just for delivering messages; you have to figure out how you're going to receive them separately. Of course most people have an e-mail address hosted by one of a handful of large companies. But you don't have to. And if you buy your own domain, changing providers is easy. Delete your old mail on the old server, upload it to the new server, people can still contact you the same way they did before. I'm not on social media, so I don't have any dog in this fight. But all the properties of a good decentralized/federated platform are already there in decades-old protocols.
  • fsflover 1y ago
    > Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. Until the platform enshittifies like Reddit and Twitter did.
    • immibis 1y ago
      Still no one cares. They just hop to the next centralized platform that hasn't enshittified yet. As we are seeing now with Bluesky. Perhaps the idea of decentralization was incorrect to begin with, an NI hallucination - perhaps it should be all about centralization-hopping instead. I believe this is what Nostr aims for, though I've never used it.
      • nout 1y ago
• jchw 1y ago
  I think this compares AT proto PDSes to Fediverse instances. In many ways this actually underplays just how grossly centralized AT proto currently is, since some of the components are 100% centralized still. (Whereas Fediverse instances, all downsides considered, are at least self-contained fully-independent instances.)
  • edavis 1y ago
    Which components are you referring to?
    • jchw 1y ago
      In case of Bluesky, there will also only ever be a single instance of the App View. As far as I am aware though in practice there's really only the official relay or indexing services either.
      • skybrian 1y ago
        Why can't someone run another App View?
        • jchw 1y ago
          You can, it just won't be the Bluesky App View, so it's not really Bluesky. It's not like the fediverse where the instances own the URLs of the posts: they go through app views and there's a canonical URL to a Bluesky post and that's through the official app view.
          • danabramov 1y ago
            This seems misleading. Different AppViews would obviously be branded differently, but the whole point of ATProto is that there is a shared "picture" of the world. People are running alternative AppViews that consume Bluesky posts (and serve Bluesky threads). Here's the same thread on three different AppViews: - https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/post/3lxlbv2jddk22 https://zeppelin.social/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu... - https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/post/3lxlbv2jddk22 https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbo... - https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/post/3lxlbv2jddk22 https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyz5zf463ic52vqbonyu2ebu/po... These are three independent webapps indexing the same information and serving it independently. They're not different frontends for one API; these are all independent backends.
• stebalien 1y ago
  "Decentralization" isn't the end-goal so measuring it here isn't all that meaningful. Personally, I care about: 1. How hard is it to censor the network. 2. How hard would it be for some major player to enshittify the network. Furthermore, while the fediverse has a single axis for decentralization, BlueSky has 3: number of "big index servers", number of PDSs, number of domain names (how many people own their handle): 1. Increasing the number of PDSs doesn't make it harder to censor the network when everyone still uses the same big index node. 2. BlueSky's primary defense against enshittification is user account portability. I'd love to see metrics on how many users have their own domain names. Having many PDSs is also a good defense here because it reduces the impact of BlueSky (the company) shutting off the firehose, but I still think account portability is the primary defense here.
  • wmf 1y ago
    BlueSky's primary defense against enshittification is user account portability. I wonder if people would actually migrate or if they'd just get boiled.
    • DrewADesign 1y ago
      Depends on if they had something compelling to migrate to.
    • immibis 1y ago
      I made a Bluesky account. I posted some pretty boring replies to pretty boring posts, and still got banned. They didn't tell me why I was banned. I didn't bother trying to make my account immune from banning; I just quit since it was pretty boring there anyway. That's one data point against the migration hypothesis. Bluesky isn't decentralized, anyway, because of the PLC directory.
  • toofy 1y ago
    > “ Decentralization" isn't the end-goal… it would be high in my list of desirability because decentralization means agency to move freely. i like the fact that if i find the city or state i live in to be boring or economically terrible, i can move. i like it that if i don’t like the food or atmosphere of a restaurant, i can go to a different restaurant. i like that if i think billy is a constant asshole, me and my friends can move to the next table over and leave billy behind. social networks are absolutely no different, no matter how hard certain people try to convince online is different, it isn’t. we should be soooo incredibly leery of anyone who tells us it’s a good thing to have no agency to eat different food or go party at a different bar. the hair on the back of our neck should stand up every time someone tries to convince us to go to only a couple of places with the same set of rulers and tries to convince us this is somehow good for us. how many times have you heard “you want to avoid echo chambers” followed by “therefor everyone should all be on the exact same set of websites with the same set of rulers” followed by “anything less than everyone on the same site is a failure” it’s double speak: if you are not trapped here, you have an echo chamber. freedom of movement, freedom of association, etc… are incredibly important to the future health of the internet.
• msgilligan 1y ago
  TIL about the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index and I wanted to test it with a weird corner-case that I remember. At one point in the late 1980's Microsoft had a GREATER than 100% market share of the Macintosh spreadsheet market. How is this possible? Market share (for a given period) is the participant's sales in the market divided by total sales. It just so happened that Lotus had more returns than sales of their failed spreadsheet, Lotus Jazz. So Lotus, had a negative market share and Microsoft had more sales of Excel than total sales in the market, resulting in a greater than 100% market share. I don't remember the exact numbers and I believe there was at least one other competitor in the study. But let's just say the numbers were: Microsoft: 102% Lotus: -2% In that case the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index would be 102^2 + (-2)^2 = 10404 + 4 = 10408. So, in this pathological case it is possible for the HHI to exceed 10,000. Edited: Added (for a given period) above, for clarity.
  • oncallthrow 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • stavros 1y ago
      That's the beauty of software: It doesn't have a physical form, so you can buy it once but return it infinity times!
    • msgilligan 1y ago
      > The only way that makes any sense is if you subtract returns for sales made in a different period to the sales period you are considering Exactly. That's the way accounting works. They did not know in the previous quarter that the product would be returned in the following quarter, so they end up having negative sales in the current quarter. Yes it produces "garbage output", which I find amusing.
      • oncallthrow 1y ago
• blintz 1y ago
  > This page measures the concentration of the Fediverse and the Atmosphere according to the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), an indicator from economics used to measure competition between firms in an industry. Mathematically, HHI is the sum of the squares of market shares of all servers. I had not heard of this metric before - it’s neat and simple to understand. If you scaled it down to 0-100 (by dividing by 100), I think it would make the numbers more immediately understandable. I’d even consider inverting it (so 0 = centralized and 100 = decentralized), since the website title implies measuring progress ‘towards’ decentralization.
  • baq 1y ago
    OTOH the reason why they didn't normalize to 100 may be to not give people an idea that the measure is linear; seeing a score of 2500 makes you ask 'what does it mean?' whereas if you were presented with 25/100 you probably wouldn't think that it is 'highly concentrated'.
• 1oooqooq 1y ago
  mastodon is the equivalent of bsd code, but for user generated content. Microsoft and apple would just reach for bsd tcp stack etc. today bluesky just "federate" to mastodon and instantly had millions of active users, until they don't need to federate anymore, when they will blame the other instances to not migrating to some crazy protocol or something, never they will just "shut the door".
• throawayonthe 1y ago
  https://atproto.wiki/en/working-groups/indiesky/stack https://atproto.wiki/en/working-groups/indiesky/stack multiple different levels of independence to be had in the atmosphere, so it's not directly comparable (doesn't help atmosphere's case though) i personally am more excited about ATproto as a protocol, and hope https://freeourfeeds.com/ https://freeourfeeds.com/ et al can pull it off
• BaardFigur 1y ago
  I thought Bluesky was federalized? How is it not?
  • ezfe 1y ago
    It is, but most people use the central server
  • lmm 1y ago
    The federal part doesn't actually work in practice. It's just a marketing gimmick.
    • notthemessiah 1y ago
      This is factually wrong, and disproven by the fact there are now fully independent federated instances such as BlackSky and soon to be NorthSky. Furthermore, they have independent codebases which are fully compatible. Compare to ActivityPub where most instances are just running Mastodon or some close fork or risk breaking compatibility. What's the point of federation if you are stuck with a monoculture of implementations? The main BlueSky services are still by far the most popular, which is why we see centralization on the network.
      • jchw 1y ago
        Mastodon is definitely not the only fediverse setup that is popular, Misskey, Pleroma and forks of those integrate perfectly well. Given that the main Misskey instance is one of the largest fediverse instances (certainly by activity) it seems a bit unfair to criticize the fediverse on this. I mean, how many completely independent microblogging implementations does a network actually need? (Not even including things like Lemmy or Peertube which are also ActivityPub instances.) On the other hand I really think you're underselling how much more popular Bluesky services are than any existing alternatives. I don't think we can actually see the distribution of network traffic, but I would be willing to bet decent money that the sum of all alternatives to the Bluesky AppView wouldn't even crack 0.01% the traffic of the main Bluesky AppView. And, honestly, I would probably bet even more money they'll never even come close to cracking 1% ever for the entire lifetime of the protocol, unless Bluesky Social PBC literally goes out of business.
• BallsInIt 1y ago
  Wonder how one could calculate email concentration.
• qustrolabe 1y ago
  Can someone explain how Fediverse instances or any decentralized platforms deals with most obvious issues of decentralization? Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost. I mean surely instances usually don't disappear without notice but it still a totally possible thing. Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating? I don't want to lose my connection with potential friends from such instance just because of something like that. I even remember some time ago when there were news about Threads being federated some people deliberately gathered "signs" across lots of instances to collectively defederate from Threads and it's just ridiculous to me that this even happened. What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging in constant "self-censorship" making own echo-chamber as tight as possible?
  • danabramov 1y ago
    In ATProto, this is solved by not having "instances". Your data is stored on a personal server (which can ofc go down). However, your identity isn't hard-tied to that server. If you have a backup (making those more easily available is being worked on by people in the ecosystem), you can restore it on another host and point your identity there instead. So there's one level of indirection which prevents the problem you're describing. Additionally, since ATProto decouples hosting of data from hosting of applications, there is no such things as "instances" having beefs and defederating from each other. The data flows one way (from PDS to apps). Apps may choose to ban certain PDS's but generally PDS's themselves are treated as app-agnostic containers of data. So intra-network social beefs don't translate to technological cutoff or loss of mobility. Social groups and communities are decoupled from hosting.
  • immibis 1y ago
    > Like if I join some node then one day it's offline and all my data lost They just disappear. You're not appending to a long-term immutable blockchain-like archive. You're posting things to the internet and the nature of posting things to the internet (or anywhere for that matter) is that nobody guarantees they will be around forever. > Or what about those times when entire instances get involved in dramas and end up defederating Identical to "what about those times when Twitter bans someone whose tweets I want to read?" > What all this talk about fighting censorship while actively engaging Censorship and moderation are the same word
• DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
  Sadly, and fortunately, there is no such thing as "avoiding centralization", the evidence is overwhelming: == Politics & Sociology (power concentrates in organizations) - Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911) origin of the "iron law of oligarchy": even democratic groups tend to end up run by a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy - Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (1970/72): leaderless groups develop informal, unaccountable elites unless they make structure explicit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne... - Max Weber, bureaucracy & rational-legal authority: why modern societies gravitate to rule-bound, hierarchical administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational-legal_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational-legal_authority - James G. March & Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (1958): classics on bounded rationality and why attention/decision bottlenecks yield hierarchy: https://www.amazon.se/-/en/James-G-March/dp/0471567930 https://www.amazon.se/-/en/James-G-March/dp/0471567930 == Economics & Political Economy (why markets/platforms centralize) - Ronald Coase, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937): firms exist (and grow) when internal coordination is cheaper than market exchange: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937... - Oliver Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies (1975): transaction-cost economics: asset specificity & opportunism push activity into hierarchies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1496220 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1496220 - W. Brian Arthur, "Increasing Returns and Lock-In" (1989): small early advantages + network effects => path-dependent monopolies: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2234208 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2234208 - Katz & Shapiro, network effects (1985/1994): compatibility and standards help explain winner-take-most dynamics: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/systems.pdf https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/systems.pdf - Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014): when r > g, wealth concentrates; proposes progressive wealth taxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... == Networks, Complexity & Information (why hubs and hierarchies emerge) Albert-László Barabási, Linked (2002): preferential attachment makes networks develop hubs (central nodes) http://networksciencebook.com/chapter/5 http://networksciencebook.com/chapter/5 Herbert A. Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity" (1962): complex systems often become hierarchical because modular hierarchies are easier to evolve and manage https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/ArchitectureOfComplexity.HSimon1962.pdf https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/... W. Ross Ashby, "Law of Requisite Variety" (1956): controllers need at least as much "variety" as the environment and it often pushes toward central coordinating mechanisms (or many distributed ones with enough capacity) http://pcp.vub.ac.be/books/AshbyReqVar.pdf http://pcp.vub.ac.be/books/AshbyReqVar.pdf Gilbert & Lynch, proof of the CAP theorem (2002): in distributed computing you can’t have perfect consistency + availability under network partitions and real systems centralize/compromise to cope: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Gilbert/Brewer2.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Gilbert/Brewer2.pdf Robert K. Merton, "The Matthew Effect" (1968): cumulative advantage: success attracts more success, reinforcing centralization of recognition/resources https://garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf https://garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf == State power, legibility & infrastructure (why governments centralize) James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998): states seek legibility and large projects favor central plans and standardized populations/landscapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State (literally anything by Jim Scott -RIP- will be useful) Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2010): communications industries cycle from openness to centralized "information empires" https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993 https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire... == Technology & platforms (contemporary centralization) Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (2017): explains how platform business models + data/network effects produce concentration https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504862 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504... == When decentralization can work Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990): shows conditions (clear rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions, polycentric governance) under which decentralized, federated management of shared resources succeed https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A8BB63BC4A1433A50A3FB92EDBBB97D5 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A... ---- the literature making a counterpoint is abundant / overwhelming but that feels bleak considering when reading these works, systems thinking )the basis for "la technique") favors centralization
• daft_pink 1y ago
  So why not just wordpress and rss?
  • Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
    We've had the protocols and tech for decentralized services for 20+ years. The problem isn't the tech, it's the users! Your average Joe simply doesn't have 'must be decentralized' in their requirements. I'm guessing this is due to lack of education on the matter. But, yes I agree with you :)
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    ActivityPub is basically just less simple RSS.
    • zenmac 1y ago
      and track follows.
• nout 1y ago
  It would be great to add nostr, but nostr doesn't really match this model. Nostr doesn't need a single server to hold your identity, your app connects to many "relays" at the same time.
• hugs 1y ago
  would be awesome if they added nostr to the list, too.
• bjourne 1y ago
  So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    > except tracker sites There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.
    • diggan 1y ago
      > There are loads of different tracker sites Not to mention the mainline DHT. Not impossible or even very resource hungry to run a scraper/crawler/listener and be able to search via it, like bitmagnet (https://bitmagnet.io/ https://bitmagnet.io/) that has some fun pipe-dreams like federation of indexers and something like an decentralized private tracker.
  • saurik 1y ago
    Anyone can construct a service like Coinbase, and in fact there are numerous such sites available; at this point, you can even use PayPal! You don't even have to continue using the same one you started with: you can buy Bitcoin with PayPal and then sell it with Coinbase. It seems like a very strange definition of centralized to say that this causes any kind of centralization on Bitcoin...
    • jonahx 1y ago
      The link back to the real world is money in your bank account. While Coinbase is not the only market player who can provide that (put money in your bank in exchange for bitcoin), it's the biggest, and so there is (to a degree) de facto centralization. More so given that if Coinbase fell (due to government seizure or similar), it's likely sibling services would fall as well. Ofc, your bitcoin would still be "safe" and still be "yours" on the chain assuming you owned your wallets directly, but those guarantees would now lack meaning or real world consequences. At least until another link to the real world could be established.
• jeffgreco 1y ago
  Including Threads with Fediverse might have an interesting impact.
  • yborg 1y ago
    Threads barely interchanges with the rest of the Fediverse, it's basically bridged. By this argument you could include Truth Social and Gab, which are directly based on Mastodon source.
  • charcircuit 1y ago
    I agree. Even though the privacy control is opt in to share their posts with the fediverse, I think it's fair for Threads to be counted as a server in the fediverse holding user data. It just has more advanced privacy than others.
  • notthemessiah 1y ago
    adding Threads's 400M users changes the ActivityPub fediverse centralized market share to 99.72%, beyond that of BlueSky's share of 99.55%.
• Devasta 1y ago
  One of the nice things about mastodon is that the total lack of centralization and the absence of the dreaded algorithm means you don't have reputation farmer accounts posting bloviating nonsense the whole time. Its really great there. Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert.
  • username223 1y ago
    > Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert. Good analogy. When Twitter started, I took one look at people shouting "I had a delicious sandwich today" and "I just took an amazing dump" and wanted no part of it. When it later turned into a "clever" contest, I wanted even less. My quiet little Mastodon community, plus some outsiders I have chosen, is the kind of "social" I want. If someone starts behaving like an influencer, they get muted.
• AndreBaltazar 1y ago
  Isn't this always a problem of Marketing + UX?
• Jr23_xd 1y ago
  [dead]
• arthurcolle 1y ago
  Depressing
• nine_k 1y ago
  Decentralized has a problem. Its premise is that anyone can set up and run a node, cheaply. If the decentralized network allows for some kind of targeted broadcasting, it becomes attractive for spamming (e.g: email). If the decentralized network allows for concentration of responses on something, it becomes a potential tool for a DDoS attack (e.g.: DNS amplification). So running a node should be somehow expensive, but the expense should be written off if the receivers of the message endorse it, by a one-time action, or automatically by subscribing. An initial credit would allow to establish an audience. It looks like a perfect use case for a cryprocurrency of sorts %) But this means expensive coin generation, and distribution of the huge ledger across all nodes. That could be delegated to some specialized nodes, but here comes centralization again!
  • lukev 1y ago
    But this problem isn't fatal, and can be mitigated directly. The internet itself is extremely decentralized and while both of these things can be issues, it works in practice. I disagree that building economics into the protocol is the way forward. There's so much power and creativity that can be unlocked when the substrate is free.
    • smt88 1y ago
      It absolutely doesn't "work in practice" for the web. Read-only sites, like personal blogs, are easy to self-host but vulnerable to DDoS attacks if targeted. Writeable sites, like anything with a form or message board, are now too expensive to run because of spammers and hacking bots. We're now all paying rent to Cloudflare or Substack or whatever because you can't just be an isolated island on the open web anymore.
      • lukev 1y ago
        What are you talking about? Tons of people run personal blogs/websites, with an enormous variety of hosting structures. I call that working in practice. The fact that any individual self-hosted site could not survive a DDOS does not negate the fact that, well, the internet actually does exist.
• natch 1y ago
  >Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. I would like to know the contents of the "etc." list.
  • vaylian 1y ago
    See https://fedidb.com/ https://fedidb.com/
    • numpad0 1y ago
      Is the working? Some of stats are off by digits. 1: https://fedidb.com/servers/misskey.io https://fedidb.com/servers/misskey.io 2: https://misskey.io/notes/a8y6w6zwbd950e9h https://misskey.io/notes/a8y6w6zwbd950e9h
• Ericson2314 1y ago
  Matrix needs to also be included in this. Matrix is fancier than mastodon, but more decentralized than AT Proto.
  • zenmac 1y ago
    Yeah but it is NOT VC funded! So it doesn't get as much coverage.
• espeed 1y ago
  The universities need to get together and develop their own open-source search engine as part of an ongoing research project. It should be hosted in a distributed fashion from the universities themselves. They have the expertise and the resources these days to do it. And much of the high quality content on the public web originates from the universities anyway. It will be like the Library of Alexandria and not subject to censorship.
• oli5679 1y ago
  HHI is a pretty interesting metric. It’s calculated by taking each firm’s market share, squaring it, and summing across all firms. This gives the probability that two randomly chosen customers belong to the same firm. In one micro models of oligopoly, Cournot competition, it lines up directly with the markup firms can sustain. Outside of theory, it’s an intuitive way to average together the market power of all firms, with increases in market share for bigger players being weighted more heavily.
• qwm 1y ago
  It's so funny watching Bluesky fans defend their almost entirely centralized platform as decentralized just because it has a spec
• wsdnday 1y ago
  Personal data detached from the rest is not measured, so I think it’s not realistic to try to determine whether everyone is decentralized. Use of a central decentralized app like Bluesky is not a good approximation imo.