Yes, as soon as 99%+ of the users aren’t on the same server. That’s the bottom line. We can argue theory all day but it doesn’t change the implications of centralization.
Over the last few weeks hundreds of people have moved their accounts to the new blacksky.app PDS, and they’re running an early version of their app at blacksky.community
I’ve spent…quite a bit of time intentionally looking for alternative ATP servers and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. And I’m balls deep in this stuff. I even run my own AP server. So I’d say it’s so obscure as to be meaningless.
99.99% of the users are still on infrastructure run by Bluesky PBC…but looking at all the progress and activity, it sure seems to me that’s in the process of changing.
My guy. LOL. No. Just no. It isn’t.
so many people in the Fediverse present the fact that 99.99% of Bluesky users are still using infrastructrure run by Bluesky PBC as if it’s a gotcha
I mean…yeah? It is.
They just prefer to invest their time and energy in working to improve the situation
And we prefer to invest our time and energy into supporting an actually decentralized protocol.
rather than arguing about the semantics of “decentralization.”
At what point was anyone arguing semantics?
So can we please stop arguing about this already?
Yes, please, go ahead.
99% isn’t the threshold. I’d say like 25% or less
Well 25% is very strict, pretty sure mastodon.social is more than that for the Fediverse (I do wish other instances would grow faster to catch up)
But yea anything higher than 50% is kinda missing the point, ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternative instances instead
Majority share is too powerful
join-lemmy.org actually hides any instance that’s over 30% of Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/main/src/shared/components/instances.tsx#L451-L456
ideally they would close signups and suggest people signup on alternatives instead
Is that what you would actually expect Bluesky to do if they were committed to decentralization?
I said “ideally”, but they probably would’ve done a lot of things differently if they were committed to decentralization
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.
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.@[email protected] 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.
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.
Agreeish? (M)any one of us can download wikipedia. Does that still make it centralized when it is designed to be distributed that easily? That design choice is baked into the ethos. Centralized vs. Decentralized seems not to be binary.
But once you download It, any changes you make are only local. You cannot edit wikipedia using a non-wikipedia account (sure you can edit anonymously but then your IP functions as your account) and the articles are not systematically stored in different wikipedia instances. There is one Wikipedia.
By the way, centralized doesn’t mean “walled off”.
Once you download wikipedia, you can edit it and distribute. Other people with their own copies can merge your changes into theirs, or you can push your changes upstream. Even if they need to be signed to accepted. Doesn’t that make Wikipedia more like the Linux Kernel and less like The Encyclopedia Britannica? Sure, for the kernel there is a “main and central” repo, but the whole point of git is that it isn’t centralized. It’s distributed.
In fact, in a loose way, wikipedia meets the criteria of Free Software. You can:
- Read the source code
- Modify the source code
- Distribute the source code
- Distribute your modifications to the source code
edit: wikipedia is predominately licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
Sure but I don’t think that makes it “decentralized” it makes it as you correctly point out, open source. Those are orthogonal categories.There aren’t parts of wikipedia that are hosted in other wikipedia instances that talk to each other the same way mastodon does. There is a unique, central, Wikipedia.
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.
It’s a benefit corporation which means the board has to consider the benefit to society, employees, etc.
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
You are correct. The term is called “openwashing”. Now and then bluesky
employeescultists will come on Lemmy and mastodon and try to LARP that their for-profit company has our best interests in mind.That is by design. From a user’s perspective, the only indication that Bluesky is
decentralizedfederated is the option to select a different “hosting provider” when logging in.
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
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.
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
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
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.
