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@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.netIMHO: #BlueSky isn't decentralised or federated. The outage on 2024-11-14 is obvious proof. It may *look* decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic/storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that's all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find "networking through Relays instead of server-to-server" as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else.
[1] https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture
It's well hidden, but in Bluesky the Relay system, AppView and identity layer PLC are centralised parts.
The posts you see come from the AppView. The AppView gets its data from the Relay. The Relay gets its stuff rom the PDSes. So you always go through the relay. No direct connection from AppView to PDS. Yes, they promise that in future you might be able to run your own relay. But right now and since its inception, Bluesky runs the relay system you connect to. I call that centralised.
And as I am experimenting with local AI and run one of the #Granite models on my laptop, I asked it about the difference between Mastodon and Bluesky. Well:
"The main difference between Mastodon and Bluesky is that Mastodon is a decentralized platform with local instances, while Bluesky is a centralized platform with a single, global network."
:)
The more I look at ATproto, the "standard" behind Bluesky, the more I see vague promises of full decentralisation and federation that "currently" are implemented in centralised ways, because "right now" they "unfortunately" have to do it that way. No clear roadmap on when these centralised elements will be removed/replaced. Now if a "standard" allows for such fundamental deviations, I cannot take it serious. That's just me, though.
I also fail to see a lot of community uptake on creating alternative implementations of ATproto. Compared to the creative chaos around ActivityPub/ActivityStreams it definitely feels more like a walled garden.
So, in conclusion and IMHO, BlueSky is a successful Twitter alternative.
The Fediverse including Mastodon is not. The fediverse is a fundamentally different and bigger thing due to its truly federated nature.
And both can have their place in the market of attention.
One ultimately is a commercial endeavour while the other is not. But for the general audience that simply is not the decisive factor. One can find that A Bad Thing, or one can shrug and move on in ones preferred direction :)
@jwildeboer Yet even technically competent people fall for it on memo-list...
@sesivany @jwildeboer what we really need is a decentralized memo-list
@jwildeboer the PLC service is also centralized with no plans to allow federation afaict, which is problematic as your did:plc is your true handle and the PLC service maps handle <=> display name. There is a did:web as well but there isn't a migration path between them.
@jwildeboer It's extremely reminiscent of fake-decentralised cryptocurrencies where there is a semi-hidden centrally-controlled piece. Which makes sense given the personnel involved.
@jwildeboer
When journalists call it decentralised, they mean it is free from (financially) incentivised boosting.
@jwildeboer LOL
BTW what version of Granite are you using? 2b is reasonably fast on my computer, but not very useful. 8b is definitely better, but too slow on my computer. :/
@jwildeboer I don't think there's any technical reason BS could not be truly federated. The only reason it is not is that the owners have no intention of following through on their promise.
Honestly I think the federation architecture is interesting and would likely scale better than Mastodon if it were ever implemented. I also think that a similar model could be achieved without drastic changes to ActivityPub.
@mattb @jwildeboer I read that there's a very high threshold of entry even just in terms of hardware needed for a "relay". Much higher than a small or personal Fedi instance.
@jwildeboer I would say BlueSky is a true successor to Twitter, it's what Twitter once was at its best as a parasocial platform. And Fediverse, as @drewdevault puts it, it is a true social media. Both have their own places, but I realized parasocial media isn't for me, so I prefer a platform like Mastodon that has a more social media experience :-)
@vbabka @drewdevault @jwildeboer I read it a while ago, so I can't remember the terms, anyway I'll edit the orginal post xD
@jwildeboer I feel like it's more common now to use active users as a measure of success, but I think reality is quite different, maybe only through my narrow scope. For the life of me, I'll never get >10% of my contacts on Signal, but it is an overwhelming success. Mastodon is much the same; when Bluesky goes away in years or decades, as all corporations generally do, Mastodon (or whatever Ideological fork presents itself) will be an amazing success for me.
@jwildeboer Mastodon “lost” the Twitter replacement battle before Musk bought it, as you summarize very well, it’s fundamentally a different sort of thing. The people that want that thing will find their way here.
The average person wants to be spoon-fed entertainment with minimal mental effort and by extension you can force-feed them advertising and they’ll also swallow it. That sort of thing is easiest to deliver with a centralized platform.
@jwildeboer ping @aeris and @borisschapira, because the whole thread is related to our debate this morning.
@jwildeboer vaporware everywhere you look
kittyfailure @jwildeboer Mastodon was federated right from the launch and interoperable with pre-activitypub fediverse 
@jwildeboer you can absolutely run your own relay and people have already done that for testing at least
@mackuba Sure. At some point in the future all of Bluesky will be fully decentralised and reach federation levels that the ActivityStream already has ;) And that point is a moving target since years.
@jwildeboer I won't argue that it isn't as decentralized in practice as AP right now, I'm just saying that "they promise that in future you might be able to run your own relay" is misleading, because you can do that today
@mackuba And, as you said, that is for testing ATM. And the other argument with the did:plc still stands. Anyway, right now Bluesky is by all practical means centralised and I am not convinced that will really change. ATProto stays a proprietary, non-open standard, owned by a non-open organisation, not a community or SSO (Standard Setting Organisation) IMHO.
@mackuba "The author mentions that setting up a Relay requires around 4.5 TB of disk space, and that it’s growing by around 18 GB a day. However, that was said before the most recent bump in growth. The data and processing requirements will only accelerate as more people use the service." - https://anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/maybe-bluesky-has-won
@mackuba @jwildeboer relay, yes. So Bsky is just offloading networking costs onto the users, while keeping power.
@jwildeboer at best it could be a distributed system
@jwildeboer I've been getting the impression that the relay does all the heavy lifting and that PDSs are set up just to serve the relay. If the relay goes down I don't think most PDSs can suddenly handle all the traffic in that kind of decentralized environment.
@jwildeboer And yesterday I read that DM are even more centralized, bypassing the whole rest of the architecture.
This is a question from someone who uses a host service for my Mastodon node.
I tried setting up a relay on my tiny instance and the server instantly had issues. So, in practice, Mastodon relays don't work for me. To that end, I believe my Mastodon setup is close to this diagram. No?
@jwildeboer
I understand that. But what is the architectural difference?
You highlighted the Relay in your post. And I am saying, "I don't have access to Mastodon relays." So why is Mastodon better?
Trying to understand your objection.
Is it that BlueSky *REQUIRES* a relay and Mastodon does not?
@rob @jwildeboer
When the BSky Relay shuts down nobody can use the service.
When a Masto Server shuts down all other servers are still there, some even have the content of the shut down server.
i like this article:
BlueSky is cosplaying decentralisation
https://rys.io/en/167.html
It depends on which relay you use, the general relays can totally overwhelm small instances.
However, there's a relay service at https://relay.fedi.buzz which is more suited to small servers as you can follow narrower relays based on specific hashtags.
@FediThing
I'm pretty sure that's the one I tried. As soon as I hooked it up, everything started crawling.
Here's the other thing...what is the advantage of this relay? What do I get from it? I'd pay more to my host for more CPUs if a relay made a difference. But to the point of @jwildeboer, maybe it isn't necessary.
@jwildeboer Silicon Valley being Silicon Valley, you say? :)
@aral @jwildeboer ATproto exists specifically because the existing open protocols were design against chokepoint capitalism. It's literally designed around the existence of a chokepoint (multiple ones, in fact, when you add PLC DIDs)
@oblomov @jwildeboer If you say so.
@aral @jwildeboer color me shocked, shocked!
@jwildeboer It's also not running on thin air, but uses VC money and that money will request a profit at some point.
They can't make profit on a free service, so at some point they will sell it or implement some of the shitty tactics of crypto boys (CEO, Dorsey) or they will skim the data themselves and sell it to the highest bidder.
Nothing on the Internet is free. I'm amazed people fall for it again and again... 
@ssamulczyk @jwildeboer
I think they have plans to make subscriptions for more storage or something.
They said that they will not hyperfinancialise with crypto, nft and tokens but never excluded financialise (at least i see there a difference)
But i would belive them in the point that they, at least unlikely, use that because that would make a big part of the userbase very angry
Also, the BlueSky staff have been paid in equity in the company so if Google or Microsoft or whoever bought BlueSky, the staff would each be winning the lottery. (That's why Twitter took Musk to court to force him to take over, because Twitter wanted their massive post-takeover payouts.)
In other words the financial structure of BlueSky is encouraging its staff to make a network that can be sold easily. This is the opposite to what the Fediverse aims for, which is to prevent any buyouts of the network.
If BlueSky truly decentralised, it would discourage takeovers and put staff payouts at risk.
@jwildeboer
Two links that might interest you
1 BlueSky is Cosplaying Decentralisation
https://rys.io/en/167.html
2 some dude ranting about how the protocol works
https://layer8.space/@sam@urbanists.social/110339902737462219
@jwildeboer Exactly.
Of course, they'd probably be quite happy for you to volunteer your free labour and storage for them to control.
@jwildeboer preciesly that.
#BlueSky is just #Shitter for #Dorsey fans with #StockholmSyndrome!
@jwildeboer You *can* run your own relay, it's just complicated and expensive and most people don't care. (Look at how many people just make an account on mastodon.social vs set up their own.) If Bluesky started to go the way of Twitter, it would be (almost) possible to migrate without losing everything, like you do when leaving Twitter. Let's see if that almost becomes an issue.
Saw this post about the risks of defederation (in the case of Rapberry Pi) and thought of this conversation.
One more link to consider (via tech meme) that discusses how BlueSky federation might be years away.
@jwildeboer well I host my alt account on my own PDS on a little Raspberry Pi, and whilst the website was slow on my main, from my alt you wouldn’t have known it was slow or down.