I didn’t even realize that decentralization was a selling point for Bluesky. I genuinely thought it was just Twitter but not run by Elon Musk
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Is anyone arguing at this point?
It’s not decentralized. There’s no argument.
It is decentralised.
Check: blacksky.community, atproto.africa, altq.net, app.wafrn.net and zeppelin.social.
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I’ve seen people arguing. On Mastodon, weirdly enough.
If you don’t want to hear any criticism, stop bringing up pseudo-decentralized corpo VC-backed Twitter 2.0
:3
what about matrix , they also do business
Matrix has a profitable business model that doesn’t involve exploiting users. BlueSky doesn’t.
There is a difference between providing services to fund development and “We take VC capital now and try to make it profitable later”, which just invites enshittification.
Also Matrix is much better federated than BS + everything is open and was so for a long time
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Slightly better you mean. 30% is on matrix.org and an estimated 70% runs on servers provided by EMS (this figure includes matrix.org).
And Matrix is also VC funded. They have some other income yes, but it is insufficient to fund many of their current activities. As a result enshittification is already happening.
Matrix is basically the Bluesky of chat. If you want an Fediverse equivalent have a look at XMPP/Jabber.
Matrix.org is VC funded (which is why it will go freemium soon AFAIK) and not 99% is on Matrix.org as you mentioned
I can freely and easily federate with any other homeserver to matrix.org
I can freely and easily federate with *.bsky.network and bsky.app.
There is no argument. It’s centralised.
Centralization on its own is not a deal breaker. Wikipedia is centralized.
Corporate/business ownership on it’s own is not a deal breaker. There are many business mastodon instances: https://mastodonservers.net/servers/business
It’s the combination that is a deal breaker. Corporate AND centralized. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a predictably boring story that ends with enshittification.
Luckily, there’s non-corporate bluesky servers that I can use instead of the main one.
Author: points out how Bluesky is not decentralized.
Also Author: only points out how people are arguing about how Bluesky is decentralized.
Author: Mission Accomplished.
More importantly it’s for-profit capitalist crap? With ethical and moral considerations, there is no reason to push this when there are alternatives with much better starting blocks.
Capitalism is not bad
bluesky is technically decentralized, but the way it does it makes self-hosting all but impossible due to storage requirements. because of that, it really isnt. its like how a lot of ai models are ‘open-source’ even though the training data isnt available and the ai is still effectively a black box. it isnt decentralized unless anyone can make an instance, just like how it isnt open-source unless you have access to everything that makes it work (yes, by this definition chromium and android aren’t truly open-source, and I stand by that).
The storage requirements aren’t an issue anymore.
You can self host everything for around ~$34 a month.@gabboman@app.wafrn.net runs an alternate bluesky instance (kinda) and he’s not bankrupt yet. Hell, it was on a free oracle server for a while.
but can I use a random old computer I have in my house to run an instance as long as there are a managable number of users? renting a server isnt self hosting. making one yourself is self hosting.
Yes, you can.
You can easily run a PDS, that’s the main public-facing part, you’d need port forwarding and a domain name for this.
Appviews are easier to host imo, https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite is what I use. You can run this on a PC right now, and log in with your bluesky account.thats not a whole instance though. thats just a place for an account to be. on activity pub platforms anyone can just make an entire indepent and independently functional instance of the platform.
???
The PDS and the Appview combined are equivalent to an instance. Both run on shitware.
I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.
Hey, the at protocol is pretty simple really.
Essentially, the network has three main parts:
- PDSes: These are “dumb” data stores. The do not do anything except store data and handle authentication. Your account “lives” on them, but you can migrate between them seamlessly, and keep your data when you migrate.
- Relays: These connect to PDSes over websocket and store all the data from them. They provide a “firehose” of data through websockets. The advantage of relays is that there is far less missing information than on the fediverse.
- AppViews: These connect to relays and take the posts. They sort through the data and only keep what is relevant for them.
For example, bsky.app is an appview. It connects to the bolson.bsky.dev relay, and only takes objects that have anapp.bsky.*nsid/type. frontpage.fyi is another one, it connects to the relay1.us-west.bsky.network relay, it ignores all posts that except for ones withfyi.frontpage.*nsids, and that are too long.
This approach is way better than activitypub.
Relays aren’t necessary, nor expensive to run (anymore). For example, appviewlite can be run easily, and can be configured to crawl PDSes itself, rather than using a relay.
The cost in running relays has also dropped. It’s roughly $34 a month. Read this article by a bluesky dev: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y.
It has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way in the real world right now.
I’m not going to deny that most people using bluesky’s servers is a problem, because it is.Jack Dorsey wasn’t very involved in bluesky, and isn’t involved at all anymore. He left the board and deleted his account after they did moderation.
Bluesky, right now, is federated in a meaningful way. Whether or not it’s decentralised only depends on your definition of the word at this point.
Also: the people who work at bluesky, right now, have very good intentions. I don’t really think any are crypto-bros. The main problem is investors trying to claw back some value after they invested in it.
I will continue to point it out as long as people keep recommending it. Its not a minor complaint or a small point of disagreement, its a complete deal breaker that makes the platform worthless to invest any time in. No matter how much time passes it will always be a shit platform as long as its centralized.
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
Also bluesky isnt part of the fediverse so this doesnt even really belong in here…
There are four other posts about Bluesky or ATProto on the front page of !fediverse@lemmy.world (when viewed from lemmy.zip), so I guessed otherwise.
I think the sidebar clarifies it pretty well
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub
Yeah and “but other people are doing it” is not a valid excuse lol
That is exactly what I meant, just because other people are doing it too, it doesn’t stop you from reading the sidebar
can anyone recommend a good read into the actual developments happening with ATproto as of late? i’ve seen a lot of insisting lately that things are changing/have changed but no one’s saying what exactly is or has changed
Fediverse Reports regularly talks about updates with ATProto, and I found this blog post mentioned in another blog post from WeDistribute.
The most interesting development as of late is the progress of Blacksky. It is the first major attempt at creating an independent “Bluesky Instance”–where in that it’s functionally the same as Bluesky but doesn’t rely on any of Bluesky’s infrastructure.
There is also Wafrn, which is really hard to explain. @gabboman@app.wafrn.net is in this thread somewhere and will have to explain it.
