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If Bluesky wants to be taken seriously they need to invest in decentralization themselves and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.

• Kwpolska 9mo ago
  How many users actually care about decentralization?
  • direwolf20 9mo ago
    None, and it's okay to make a centralised platform but I wish people wouldn't fall for the decentralised marketing hype.
• bramhaag 9mo ago
  Unfortunately most people couldn't care less. Bluesky has been lying about being decentralized since day 1, and yet they have millions of users.
  • wolvoleo 9mo ago
    I think a lot of those users do care but they don't know they've been lying.
  • danpalmer 9mo ago
    Bluesky has been asymptotically approaching full decentralisation. A few years ago the gap was everything except a decentralised design, then it was AppViews, now it's "tooling and documentation" for the bit of the PKI that only 50 entities have done. Meanwhile I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once, couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance, lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on, all classic signs of centralisation.
    • bramhaag 9mo ago
      > all classic signs of centralisation. No, these are classic signs of decentralization. > I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them. > couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization. > lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access. On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.
      • danpalmer 9mo ago
        Being beholden to a particular server I have no control over sounds like what happened with Twitter/X. The posts might exist, but they aren't associated with me. Why not? Because I was locked into somewhere and unable to vote with my feet and go elsewhere. Maybe I stopped paying because the instance owner enforced sanctions against my country? Why should I lose my identity because of that? > Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization. Compatibility issues means lock-in to instances under individual control. Shared protocols means lock-in to a protocol, but ultimately freedom to move. We know that open protocols trumps opt-in collaboration by private entities for freedom. > You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access. See also: instances not federating with other instances that are too small. You technically can, but in practice it goes nowhere. > On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. Bluesky is not perfect, but where it's approaching full decentralisation quickly on a solid foundation, ActivityPub has become the Mastodon show, and is less a decentralised social network, and more a federated set of centralised services with little accountability to users. You can't move, you can't control the content you see, you can't even search. It's a reversion to the days of 14 year olds drunk on power as a mod on a phpbb forum, or the Reddit mods of today.
  • account42 9mo ago
    I think most Bluesky users were happy with a centralized Twitter as long as the people running it were ideologically aligned.